Archetypes
Archetypes Are Our Eternal Ancestors
Thus the archetype as a phenomenon is conditioned by place and time, but on the other hand it is an invisible structural pattern independent of place and time, and like the instincts proves to be an essential component of the psyche.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 538-539.
If I say that we do not know "the ultimate derivation of the archetype," I mean that we are unable to observe and describe the archetype in its unconscious condition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373
As we do not know the actual status of an archetype in the unconscious and only know it in that form in which it becomes conscious, it is impossible to describe the human archetype and to compare it to an animal archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 372-373
But the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge to what is to come.
That is the God yet to come.
It is not the coming God himself but his image which appears in the supreme meaning.
God is an image, and those who worship him must worship him in the images of the supreme meaning.
The supreme meaning is not a meaning and not an absurdity, it is image and force in one, magnificence and force together.
The supreme meaning is the beginning and the end.
It is the bridge of going across and fulfillment.
--Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 229-230.
This, too, is an expression of something that has always claimed my deepest interest and my greatest attention: the manifestation of archetypes, or archetypal forms, in all the phenomena of life: in biology, physics, history, folklore, and art, in theology and mythology, in parapsychology, as well as in the symptoms of insane patients and neurotics, and finally in the dreams and life of every individual man and woman.
The intimation of forms hovering in a background not in itself knowable gives life the depth which, it seems to me, makes it worth living. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 396-397
Or in other words: there is no outside to the collective psyche. In our ordinary mind we are in the worlds of time and space and within the separate individual psyche. In the state of the archetype we are in the collective psyche, in a world-system whose space-time categories are relatively or absolutely abolished. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
t is a structural element of the psyche we find everywhere and at all times; and it is that in which all individual psyches are identical with each other, and where they function as if they were the one undivided psyche the ancients called anima mundi or the psyche toukosmou. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
We conclude therefore that we have to expect a factor in the psyche that is not subject to the laws of time and space, as it is on the contrary capable of suppressing them to a certain extent. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
Concerning archetypes, migration and verbal transmission are self-evident, except in those cases where individuals reproduce archetypal forms outside of all possible external influences (good examples in childhood dreams!). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
The 'absolute knowledge' which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self-subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. [1][2] In other words, it is the error of treating something which is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing . A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality. Mathematical or simulation models may help understand a system or situation, but they model an abstract and simple mental image, not real life (which will also differ from the model): "the map is not the territory". Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.
Emotions follow an instinctual pattern, i.e., an archetype. ~ Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Where an archetype prevails, we can expect synchronistic phenomena, i.e., acausal correspondences, which consist in a parallel arrangement of facts in time. The arrangement is not the effect of a cause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
It looks as if the collective character of the archetypes would manifest itself also in meaningful coincidences, i.e., as if the archetype (or the collective unconscious) were not only inside the individual, but also outside, viz. in one's environment, as if sender and percipient were in the same psychic space, or in the same time (in precognition cases).
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Just as the physicist regards the atom as a model, I regard archetypal ideas as sketches for the purpose of visualizing the unknown background. --C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 64-65.
No doubt the archetypes are present everywhere, but there is also a widespread resistance to this "mythology." That is why even the gospel has to be "demythologized." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 83-86.
Divine favour and daemonic evil or danger are archetypal.
The self is transcendental and is only partially conscious.
Empirically it is good and evil.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 52-53.
My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern.
Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. Its autonomy is an observable fact and not a philosophical hypostasis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
With increasing approximation to the centre there is a corresponding depotentiation of the ego in favour of the influence of the "empty" centre, which is certainly not identical with the archetype but is the thing the archetype points to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
I don't know whether the archetype is "true" or not. I only know that it lives and that I have not made it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
"God" in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental "model," an archetypal "arrangement" of individual, contemporary and historical contents, which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism, just like the image of the "evolving" God or of Yahweh or the Summum Bonum or the Trinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
On the other hand "God" is a verbal image, a predicate or mythologem founded on archetypal premises which underlie the structure of the psyche as images of the instincts ("instinctual patterns"). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
I have in all conscience never supposed that in discussing the psychic structure of the God-image I have taken God himself in hand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
All statements about and beyond the "ultimate" are anthropomorphisms and, if anyone should think that when he says "God" he has also predicated God, he is endowing his words with magical power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
The up surging archetypal material is the stuff of which mental illnesses are made. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
For me "God" is on the one hand a mystery that cannot be unveiled, and to which I must attribute only one quality: that it exists in the form of a particular psychic event which I feel to be numinous and cannot trace back to any sufficient cause lying within my field of experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as "God," so we can describe the "emptiness" of the centre as "God."
Emptiness in this sense doesn't mean "absence" or "vacancy," but something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
As a young man I drew the conclusion that you must obviously fulfill your destiny in order to get to the point where a donum gratiae might happen along. But I was far from certain, and always kept the possibility in mind that on this road I might end up in a black hole. I have remained true to this attitude all my life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-258.
The archetype itself (nota bene not the archetypal representation!) is psychoid,i.e., transcendental and thus relatively beyond the categories of number, space, and time. That means, it approximates to oneness and immutability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 317-319.
So far as the integration of personality components are concerned, it must be borne in mind that the ego-personality as such does not include the archetypes but is only influenced by them; for the archetypes are universal and belong to the collective psyche over which the ego has no control. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
Emotions follow an instinctual pattern, i.e., an archetype. ~ Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Where an archetype prevails, we can expect synchronistic phenomena, i.e., acausal correspondences, which consist in a parallel arrangement of facts in time. The arrangement is not the effect of a cause. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
It looks as if the collective character of the archetypes would manifest itself also in meaningful coincidences, i.e., as if the archetype (or the collective unconscious) were not only inside the individual, but also outside, viz. in one's environment, as if sender and percipient were in the same psychic space, or in the same time (in precognition cases).
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Just as the physicist regards the atom as a model, I regard archetypal ideas as sketches for the purpose of visualizing the unknown background. --C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 64-65.
No doubt the archetypes are present everywhere, but there is also a widespread resistance to this "mythology." That is why even the gospel has to be "demythologized." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 83-86.
Divine favour and daemonic evil or danger are archetypal.
The self is transcendental and is only partially conscious.
Empirically it is good and evil.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 52-53.
My God-image corresponds to an autonomous archetypal pattern.
Therefore I can experience God as if he were an object, but I need not assume that it is the only image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. Its autonomy is an observable fact and not a philosophical hypostasis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
With increasing approximation to the centre there is a corresponding depotentiation of the ego in favour of the influence of the "empty" centre, which is certainly not identical with the archetype but is the thing the archetype points to. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
I don't know whether the archetype is "true" or not. I only know that it lives and that I have not made it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
"God" in this sense is a biological, instinctual and elemental "model," an archetypal "arrangement" of individual, contemporary and historical contents, which, despite its numinosity, is and must be exposed to intellectual and moral criticism, just like the image of the "evolving" God or of Yahweh or the Summum Bonum or the Trinity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
On the other hand "God" is a verbal image, a predicate or mythologem founded on archetypal premises which underlie the structure of the psyche as images of the instincts ("instinctual patterns"). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
I have in all conscience never supposed that in discussing the psychic structure of the God-image I have taken God himself in hand. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
All statements about and beyond the "ultimate" are anthropomorphisms and, if anyone should think that when he says "God" he has also predicated God, he is endowing his words with magical power. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
The up surging archetypal material is the stuff of which mental illnesses are made. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
For me "God" is on the one hand a mystery that cannot be unveiled, and to which I must attribute only one quality: that it exists in the form of a particular psychic event which I feel to be numinous and cannot trace back to any sufficient cause lying within my field of experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 254-256.
As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as "God," so we can describe the "emptiness" of the centre as "God."
Emptiness in this sense doesn't mean "absence" or "vacancy," but something unknowable which is endowed with the highest intensity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
As a young man I drew the conclusion that you must obviously fulfill your destiny in order to get to the point where a donum gratiae might happen along. But I was far from certain, and always kept the possibility in mind that on this road I might end up in a black hole. I have remained true to this attitude all my life. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-258.
The archetype itself (nota bene not the archetypal representation!) is psychoid,i.e., transcendental and thus relatively beyond the categories of number, space, and time. That means, it approximates to oneness and immutability. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 317-319.
So far as the integration of personality components are concerned, it must be borne in mind that the ego-personality as such does not include the archetypes but is only influenced by them; for the archetypes are universal and belong to the collective psyche over which the ego has no control. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
"One is the beginning, the Sun God.
"Two is Eros, for he binds two together and spreads himself out in brightness.
"Three is the Tree of Life, for it fills space with bodies.
"Four is the devil, for he opens all that is closed. He dissolves everything formed and physical; he is the destroyer in whom everything becomes nothing.
~Diahmon, Liber Novus, 351.
I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most close*ly became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man's prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31
I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.
As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as "God," so we can describe the "emptiness" of the center as "god." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 258-259.
We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than
we know the origin of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 14.
The archetypes are complementary and equivalents of the "outside" world and therefore possess "cosmic" character. Thins explains their numinosity and godlikeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 196.
The archetype is an irrepresentable factor, a "disposition" which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the human mind and arranges the material of consciousness in definite patterns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 148.
We must, however, constantly bear in mind that what we mean by "archetype" is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualization of it possible, namely the archetypal images and ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 214.
I have landed in the Eastern sphere through the waters of the unconscious, for the truths of the unconscious can never be thought up, they can be reached only by following a path which all cultures right down to the most primitive level have called the way of initiation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 87.
We must, however, constantly bear in mind that what we mean by "archetype" is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualization of it possible, namely the archetypal images and ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 214.
When an archetype is constellated it can appear in the inner and the outer world at the same time. Each distinct case is an example of creation. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
When an archetypal event approaches the sphere of consciousness, it also manifests itself in the outer life. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
A woman is more likely to acknowledge her own duality. A man is continually blinded by his intellect and does not learn through insight. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 51.
If a primordial image forces itself onto consciousness, we have to fill it with as much substance as possible to grasp the whole scope of its meaning. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 368.
When I say as a psychologist , that God is an archetype, I mean by that the "type" in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 14.
You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.
Another way is they tell them all of the things they should not do, like the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not," and that is always supported by mythological tales.
That, of course, gave me a motive to study the archetypes, because I began to see that the structure of what I then called the collective
unconscious was really a sort of agglomeration of such typical images, each of which had a unique quality.
The archetypes are, at the same time, dynamic.
They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented.
They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that one could best compare with myths.
That's the origin of mythology.
Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes.
So the statements of every religion, of many poets, etc., are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.
For instance, our ancestors have done so and so, and so shall you do.
Or such and such a hero has done so and so, and that is your model.
~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Pages 16-18.
It is quite certain, however, that man is born with a certain functioning, a certain way of functioning, a certain pattern of behavior which is expressed in the form of archetypal images, or archetypal forms. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 16.
It [The Mandala] is the archetype of inner order; and it is always used in that sense, either to make arrangements of the many, many aspects of the universe, a world scheme, or to arrange the complicated aspects of our psyche into a scheme. ~Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
Primeval history is the story of the beginning of consciousness by differentiation from the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32
It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 96.
You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17
On account of its transcendence, the a archetype per se is as irrepresentable as the nature of light and hence must be strictly distinguished from the archetypal idea or mythologem (see "Der Geist der Psychologie" in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1946 ).
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 21-23.
Archetypes are not mere concepts but are entities, exactly like whole numbers, which are not merely aids to counting but possess irrational qualities that do not result from the concept of counting, as for instance the prime numbers and their behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 22.
When I say "atom" I am talking of the model made of it; when I say "archetype" I am talking of ideas corresponding to it, but never of the thing-in itself, which in both cases is a transcendental mystery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom either.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
So the identity with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 15.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 152.
One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
"Two is Eros, for he binds two together and spreads himself out in brightness.
"Three is the Tree of Life, for it fills space with bodies.
"Four is the devil, for he opens all that is closed. He dissolves everything formed and physical; he is the destroyer in whom everything becomes nothing.
~Diahmon, Liber Novus, 351.
I would like to suggest that every psychic reaction which is out of proportion to its precipitating cause should be investigated as to whether it may be conditioned at the same time by an archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
Phylogenetically as well as ontogenetically we have grown up out of the dark confines of the earth; hence the factors that affected us most close*ly became archetypes, and it is these primordial images which influence us most directly, and therefore seem to be the most powerful. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 32.
We shall have to reckon with quite unusual difficulties in dealing with it, and the first of these is that the archetype and its function must be understood far more as a part of man's prehistoric, irrational psychology than as a rationally conceivable system. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
Archetypes are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure—indeed, they are its psychic aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31
I tried to give a general view of the structure of the unconscious. Its contents, the archetypes, are as it were the hidden foundations of the conscious mind, or, to use another comparison, the roots which the psyche has sunk not only in the earth in the narrower sense but in the world in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 31.
We should make the archetype responsible only for a definite, minimal, normal degree of fear; any pronounced increase, felt to be abnormal, must have special causes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Page 33.
As the Chinese would say, the archetype is only the name of Tao, not Tao itself. Just as the Jesuits translated Tao as "God," so we can describe the "emptiness" of the center as "god." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 258-259.
We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than
we know the origin of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 14.
The archetypes are complementary and equivalents of the "outside" world and therefore possess "cosmic" character. Thins explains their numinosity and godlikeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9, Page 196.
The archetype is an irrepresentable factor, a "disposition" which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the human mind and arranges the material of consciousness in definite patterns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 148.
We must, however, constantly bear in mind that what we mean by "archetype" is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualization of it possible, namely the archetypal images and ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 214.
I have landed in the Eastern sphere through the waters of the unconscious, for the truths of the unconscious can never be thought up, they can be reached only by following a path which all cultures right down to the most primitive level have called the way of initiation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 87.
We must, however, constantly bear in mind that what we mean by "archetype" is in itself irrepresentable, but has effects which make visualization of it possible, namely the archetypal images and ideas. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 214.
When an archetype is constellated it can appear in the inner and the outer world at the same time. Each distinct case is an example of creation. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
When an archetypal event approaches the sphere of consciousness, it also manifests itself in the outer life. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 55.
A woman is more likely to acknowledge her own duality. A man is continually blinded by his intellect and does not learn through insight. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 51.
If a primordial image forces itself onto consciousness, we have to fill it with as much substance as possible to grasp the whole scope of its meaning. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 368.
When I say as a psychologist , that God is an archetype, I mean by that the "type" in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 14.
You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17.
Another way is they tell them all of the things they should not do, like the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not," and that is always supported by mythological tales.
That, of course, gave me a motive to study the archetypes, because I began to see that the structure of what I then called the collective
unconscious was really a sort of agglomeration of such typical images, each of which had a unique quality.
The archetypes are, at the same time, dynamic.
They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented.
They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that one could best compare with myths.
That's the origin of mythology.
Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes.
So the statements of every religion, of many poets, etc., are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.
For instance, our ancestors have done so and so, and so shall you do.
Or such and such a hero has done so and so, and that is your model.
~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Pages 16-18.
It is quite certain, however, that man is born with a certain functioning, a certain way of functioning, a certain pattern of behavior which is expressed in the form of archetypal images, or archetypal forms. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 16.
It [The Mandala] is the archetype of inner order; and it is always used in that sense, either to make arrangements of the many, many aspects of the universe, a world scheme, or to arrange the complicated aspects of our psyche into a scheme. ~Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 21.
Primeval history is the story of the beginning of consciousness by differentiation from the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32
It is a great mistake in practice to treat an archetype as if it were a mere name, word, or concept. It is far more than that: it is a piece of life, an image connected with the living individual by the bridge of emotion. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 96.
You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 17
On account of its transcendence, the a archetype per se is as irrepresentable as the nature of light and hence must be strictly distinguished from the archetypal idea or mythologem (see "Der Geist der Psychologie" in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1946 ).
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 21-23.
Archetypes are not mere concepts but are entities, exactly like whole numbers, which are not merely aids to counting but possess irrational qualities that do not result from the concept of counting, as for instance the prime numbers and their behaviour. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 22.
When I say "atom" I am talking of the model made of it; when I say "archetype" I am talking of ideas corresponding to it, but never of the thing-in itself, which in both cases is a transcendental mystery. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
Nobody has ever seen an archetype, and nobody has ever seen an atom either.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
So the identity with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 15.
Nobody would assume that the biological pattern is a philosophical assumption like the Platonic idea or a Gnostic hypostasis. The same is true of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 152.
One must therefore assume that the effective archetypal ideas, including our model of the archetype, rest on something actual even though unknowable, just as the model of the atom rests on certain unknowable qualities of matter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 53-55.
archetype (n.) "original pattern from which copies are made," 1540s [Barnhart] or c.1600 [OED], from Latin archetypum, from Greek arkhetypon "pattern, model, figure on a seal," neuter of adjective arkhetypos "first-moulded," from arkhe- "first" (see archon) + typos "model, type, blow, mark of a blow" (see type). Jungian psychology sense of "pervasive idea or image from the collective unconscious" is from 1919. Jung defined archetypal images as "forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous individual products of unconscious origin." ["Psychology and Religion" 1937]
Often when people behave in an exceedingly unexpected manner the appearance of an archetype is the explanation ; archetypes go back not only through human history, but to our ancestors the animals, that is why we are able to understand animals so well and make friends with them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 177.
The moment where the archetype appears is always characterized by remarkable emotion; it, as it were, fascinates the dreamer and exalts him, as if the Muse had kissed him not only on the forehead but on the shoulder. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 177.
It is when we come to a summit in life that the archetypal symbols appear. These primeval pictures of human life form the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Pages 176-177.
It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness-with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 313.
When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one's life.
One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin.
The more an archetype is amplified the more understandable it becomes.
It is hard to explain because the spiritual cannot be expressed in a few words.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness.
Archetypes are not matters of faith; we can know that they are there.
An archetype is composed of an instinctual factor and a spiritual image.
The approaches to it from the instinctual or the spiritual side are very different.
The libido cannot be freed, however, unless the archetypal images can be made conscious.
When fantasy pictures are brought into consciousness their intrinsic energy is liberated.
In this way the instincts become integrated and ordered. When only the instinctual element of the archetypal content is active there is chaos (massa confusa).
Archetypes can change whilst the individual remains quite unconscious of their movements.
Conceivable they change spontaneously. The archetypal content of dreams disappears and is replaced by a new one, even when the earlier form has not come into consciousness.
From the nature of a particular archetype it is possible to predict which will follow it.
It can be assumed that the flow of archetypes at a particular time characterize that historical period in a particular way.
The typical events of an era are determined by the succession and the quality of the corresponding archetypal images. The succession of the archetypal motives is a collective development and has nothing to do with the individual. We may imagine that the archetypes, being only the residual deposits of human experiences, would have represented animalistic life in an earlier period.
The archetypal primordial forms were already present, however, at the dawn of human consciousness; at its centre, everything was already there as an apriori possibility.
Even the first experiences of man were already fixed; we can only translate these patterns, these archetypes, into form we can understand.
Men have to realize the archetypes which are present at an unconscious level in creation.
All potentialities lie in the unconscious like ideas that have not yet been embodied nor experienced yet as reality.
The archetypes are present in the unconscious as potential abilities which, at a given moment, are realized and applied when brought into consciousness by a creative act.
As an analogy we can suppose that every inspiration produced out of the unconscious has a history.
A new situation occurs as a constellation produced by the archetype, a new inspiration emerges, and something else is discovered and becomes a part of reality.
A host of possibilities is still embedded in the archetypes, in the realm of the Mothers.
The abundance of possibilities eludes our comprehension.
The origin of the archetypes is a crucial question.
Where space and time are relative it is not possible to speak of developments in time.
Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the pleroma.
I remember standing on a mountain top in inner Africa, seeing around me an endless expanse of brush and herds of animals grazing, all in a deep silence as it had been for thousands of years without anyone being aware of it. "They" were present but not consciously seen; they were as nameless as in Paradise before Adam named them.
Name-giving is an act of creation.
Where space and time do not exist there is only oneness (monotes).
There is no differentiation; there is only pleroma.
Pleroma is always with us, under our feet and above our heads.
Man is the point that has become visible, stepping out from the pleroma, knowing what he is doing, and able to name the things about him. Although the earth existed before there were any human beings, it could not be seen or known by anyone.
In China they say that the ancestor of the family, the one who stood at the beginning, is the Cosmos. Out of him was everything created: in the time before time.
There is nothing to explain or distinguish in the oneness because sequence and causality do not exist. The archetypes are the material of the God- Creator. The constitute a primeval ocean charged with potentiality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Pages 21-22.
…a creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.
Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Page 82.
"The "archetype" is practically synonymous with the biological concept of the behaviour pattern. But as the latter designates external phenomena chiefly, I have chosen the term "archetype" for "psychic pattern." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
Often when people behave in an exceedingly unexpected manner the appearance of an archetype is the explanation ; archetypes go back not only through human history, but to our ancestors the animals, that is why we are able to understand animals so well and make friends with them. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Vol. 2, Page 177.
The moment where the archetype appears is always characterized by remarkable emotion; it, as it were, fascinates the dreamer and exalts him, as if the Muse had kissed him not only on the forehead but on the shoulder. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 177.
It is when we come to a summit in life that the archetypal symbols appear. These primeval pictures of human life form the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Pages 176-177.
It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness-with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 313.
When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one's life.
One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin.
The more an archetype is amplified the more understandable it becomes.
It is hard to explain because the spiritual cannot be expressed in a few words.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness.
Archetypes are not matters of faith; we can know that they are there.
An archetype is composed of an instinctual factor and a spiritual image.
The approaches to it from the instinctual or the spiritual side are very different.
The libido cannot be freed, however, unless the archetypal images can be made conscious.
When fantasy pictures are brought into consciousness their intrinsic energy is liberated.
In this way the instincts become integrated and ordered. When only the instinctual element of the archetypal content is active there is chaos (massa confusa).
Archetypes can change whilst the individual remains quite unconscious of their movements.
Conceivable they change spontaneously. The archetypal content of dreams disappears and is replaced by a new one, even when the earlier form has not come into consciousness.
From the nature of a particular archetype it is possible to predict which will follow it.
It can be assumed that the flow of archetypes at a particular time characterize that historical period in a particular way.
The typical events of an era are determined by the succession and the quality of the corresponding archetypal images. The succession of the archetypal motives is a collective development and has nothing to do with the individual. We may imagine that the archetypes, being only the residual deposits of human experiences, would have represented animalistic life in an earlier period.
The archetypal primordial forms were already present, however, at the dawn of human consciousness; at its centre, everything was already there as an apriori possibility.
Even the first experiences of man were already fixed; we can only translate these patterns, these archetypes, into form we can understand.
Men have to realize the archetypes which are present at an unconscious level in creation.
All potentialities lie in the unconscious like ideas that have not yet been embodied nor experienced yet as reality.
The archetypes are present in the unconscious as potential abilities which, at a given moment, are realized and applied when brought into consciousness by a creative act.
As an analogy we can suppose that every inspiration produced out of the unconscious has a history.
A new situation occurs as a constellation produced by the archetype, a new inspiration emerges, and something else is discovered and becomes a part of reality.
A host of possibilities is still embedded in the archetypes, in the realm of the Mothers.
The abundance of possibilities eludes our comprehension.
The origin of the archetypes is a crucial question.
Where space and time are relative it is not possible to speak of developments in time.
Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the pleroma.
I remember standing on a mountain top in inner Africa, seeing around me an endless expanse of brush and herds of animals grazing, all in a deep silence as it had been for thousands of years without anyone being aware of it. "They" were present but not consciously seen; they were as nameless as in Paradise before Adam named them.
Name-giving is an act of creation.
Where space and time do not exist there is only oneness (monotes).
There is no differentiation; there is only pleroma.
Pleroma is always with us, under our feet and above our heads.
Man is the point that has become visible, stepping out from the pleroma, knowing what he is doing, and able to name the things about him. Although the earth existed before there were any human beings, it could not be seen or known by anyone.
In China they say that the ancestor of the family, the one who stood at the beginning, is the Cosmos. Out of him was everything created: in the time before time.
There is nothing to explain or distinguish in the oneness because sequence and causality do not exist. The archetypes are the material of the God- Creator. The constitute a primeval ocean charged with potentiality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Pages 21-22.
…a creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work by giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.
Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Page 82.
"The "archetype" is practically synonymous with the biological concept of the behaviour pattern. But as the latter designates external phenomena chiefly, I have chosen the term "archetype" for "psychic pattern." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 151-154.
Archetypal image:
The form or representation of an archetype in consciousness. [The archetype is] a dynamism which makes itself felt in the numinosity and fascinating power of the archetypal image.["On the Nature of the Psyche," CW 8, par. 414.]
Archetypal images, as universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious, are the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends and fairy tales.
An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors. If such a content should speak of the sun and identify with it the lion, the king, the hoard of gold guarded by the dragon, or the power that makes for the life and health of man, it is neither the one thing nor the other, but the unknown third thing that finds more or less adequate expression in all these similes, yet-to the perpetual vexation of the intellect-remains unknown and not to be fitted into a formula.["The Psychology of the Child Archetype," CW 9i, par. 267]
On a personal level, archetypal motifs are patterns of thought or behavior that are common to humanity at all times and in all places. For years I have been observing and investigating the products of the unconscious in the widest sense of the word, namely dreams, fantasies, visions, and delusions of the insane.
I have not been able to avoid recognizing certain regularities, that is, types. There are types of situations and types of figures that repeat themselves frequently and have a corresponding meaning. I therefore employ the term "motif" to designate these repetitions. Thus there are not only typical dreams but typical motifs in dreams. . . .
[These] can be arranged under a series of archetypes, the chief of them being . . . the shadow, the wise old man, the child (including the child hero), the mother ("Primordial Mother"and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinate personality ("daemonic"because supraordinate), and her counterpart the maiden, and lastly the anima in man and the animus in woman.["The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,"ibid., par. 309.]
The form or representation of an archetype in consciousness. [The archetype is] a dynamism which makes itself felt in the numinosity and fascinating power of the archetypal image.["On the Nature of the Psyche," CW 8, par. 414.]
Archetypal images, as universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious, are the basic content of religions, mythologies, legends and fairy tales.
An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors. If such a content should speak of the sun and identify with it the lion, the king, the hoard of gold guarded by the dragon, or the power that makes for the life and health of man, it is neither the one thing nor the other, but the unknown third thing that finds more or less adequate expression in all these similes, yet-to the perpetual vexation of the intellect-remains unknown and not to be fitted into a formula.["The Psychology of the Child Archetype," CW 9i, par. 267]
On a personal level, archetypal motifs are patterns of thought or behavior that are common to humanity at all times and in all places. For years I have been observing and investigating the products of the unconscious in the widest sense of the word, namely dreams, fantasies, visions, and delusions of the insane.
I have not been able to avoid recognizing certain regularities, that is, types. There are types of situations and types of figures that repeat themselves frequently and have a corresponding meaning. I therefore employ the term "motif" to designate these repetitions. Thus there are not only typical dreams but typical motifs in dreams. . . .
[These] can be arranged under a series of archetypes, the chief of them being . . . the shadow, the wise old man, the child (including the child hero), the mother ("Primordial Mother"and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinate personality ("daemonic"because supraordinate), and her counterpart the maiden, and lastly the anima in man and the animus in woman.["The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,"ibid., par. 309.]
If so, the position of the archetype would be located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and, with its psychoid nature, forms the bridge to matter in general. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 420.
Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only
possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.
The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between
them.
Our present knowledge does not allow us to do much more than compare the relation of the psychic to the material world with two cones, whose apices, meeting in a point without extension—a real
zero-point—touch and do not touch.
In my previous writings I have always treated archetypal phenomena as psychic, because the material to be expounded or investigated was concerned solely with ideas and images.
The psychoid nature of the archetype, as put forward here, does not contradict these earlier formulations; it only means a further degree of conceptual differentiation, which became inevitable as soon as I saw myself obliged to undertake a more general analysis of the nature of the psyche and to clarify the empirical concepts concerning it, and their relation to one another.
Just as the "psychic infra-red," the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the "psychic ultra-violet,"
the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic, although it manifests itself psychically.
But physiological processes behave in the same way, without on that account being declared psychic.
Although there is no form of existence that is not mediated to us psychically and only psychically, it would hardly do to say that everything is merely psychic.
We must apply this argument logically to the archetypes as well.
Since their essential being is unconscious to us, and still they are experienced as spontaneous agencies, there is probably no alternative now but to describe their nature, in accordance with their
chiefest effect, as "spirit," in the sense which I attempted to make plain in my paper "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales."
If so, the position of the archetype would be located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and, with its
psychoid nature, forms the bridge to matter in general.
In archetypal conceptions and instinctual perceptions, spirit and matter confront one another on the psychic plane.
Matter and spirit both appear in the psychic realm as distinctive qualities of conscious contents.
The ultimate nature of both is transcendental, that is, irrepresentable, since the psyche and its contents are the only reality which is given to us without a medium.
~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 215-216.
Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only
possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.
The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between
them.
Our present knowledge does not allow us to do much more than compare the relation of the psychic to the material world with two cones, whose apices, meeting in a point without extension—a real
zero-point—touch and do not touch.
In my previous writings I have always treated archetypal phenomena as psychic, because the material to be expounded or investigated was concerned solely with ideas and images.
The psychoid nature of the archetype, as put forward here, does not contradict these earlier formulations; it only means a further degree of conceptual differentiation, which became inevitable as soon as I saw myself obliged to undertake a more general analysis of the nature of the psyche and to clarify the empirical concepts concerning it, and their relation to one another.
Just as the "psychic infra-red," the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the "psychic ultra-violet,"
the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic, although it manifests itself psychically.
But physiological processes behave in the same way, without on that account being declared psychic.
Although there is no form of existence that is not mediated to us psychically and only psychically, it would hardly do to say that everything is merely psychic.
We must apply this argument logically to the archetypes as well.
Since their essential being is unconscious to us, and still they are experienced as spontaneous agencies, there is probably no alternative now but to describe their nature, in accordance with their
chiefest effect, as "spirit," in the sense which I attempted to make plain in my paper "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales."
If so, the position of the archetype would be located beyond the psychic sphere, analogous to the position of physiological instinct, which is immediately rooted in the stuff of the organism and, with its
psychoid nature, forms the bridge to matter in general.
In archetypal conceptions and instinctual perceptions, spirit and matter confront one another on the psychic plane.
Matter and spirit both appear in the psychic realm as distinctive qualities of conscious contents.
The ultimate nature of both is transcendental, that is, irrepresentable, since the psyche and its contents are the only reality which is given to us without a medium.
~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 215-216.
Mythos and Logos, Shelburne
Complex/Archetype/Symbol In The Psychology Of C G Jung By Jacobi, Jolande, pg 34
The archetypes are outside as well as inside ourselves. They are dynamic processes and self-organizing patterns as well as static representations.
In talking about archetypes, it helps to note that Jung's experience with archetypes was that they are dynamic patterns, fields of potential, which have both forceful intentionality and complete independence. They are raw nature at the heart of the psyche, and, as such, serve as the foundational material for our complexes, both “good” and “bad.” The central archetype, the Self, is the transpersonal center of the psyche, and acts as the instrument and agent of transcendence. As such, it is indistinguishable from the God-image.
Our Ancestors Calling
We are THE WATCHERS; They are THE WATCHERS
Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung; "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious"; CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Page 62.
Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche.
They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual's life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
Your conception of the archetype as a psychic gene is quite possible.
It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness-with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature.
It can only be experienced as an image.
Hence the archetype can never enter consciousness in its entirety but remains a borderline phenomenon, in the sense that external stimuli impinge upon the inner archetypal datum in a zone of friction, which is precisely what we might describe consciousness as being.
This view would do greater justice to the essentially conflicting nature of consciousness.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung
"On the Nature' of the Psyche," CW 8, pars. 41 7f.
In talking about archetypes, it helps to note that Jung's experience with archetypes was that they are dynamic patterns, fields of potential, which have both forceful intentionality and complete independence. They are raw nature at the heart of the psyche, and, as such, serve as the foundational material for our complexes, both “good” and “bad.” The central archetype, the Self, is the transpersonal center of the psyche, and acts as the instrument and agent of transcendence. As such, it is indistinguishable from the God-image.
Our Ancestors Calling
We are THE WATCHERS; They are THE WATCHERS
Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~Carl Jung; "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious"; CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Page 62.
Our psyche can function as though space did not exist. The psyche can thus be independent of space, of time, and of causality. This explains the possibility of magic. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche.
They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual's life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 518.
Your conception of the archetype as a psychic gene is quite possible.
It is also a plausible hypothesis that the archetype is produced by the original life urge and then gradually grows up into consciousness-with the qualification, however, that the innermost essence of the archetype can never become wholly conscious, since it is beyond the power of imagination and language to grasp and express its deepest nature.
It can only be experienced as an image.
Hence the archetype can never enter consciousness in its entirety but remains a borderline phenomenon, in the sense that external stimuli impinge upon the inner archetypal datum in a zone of friction, which is precisely what we might describe consciousness as being.
This view would do greater justice to the essentially conflicting nature of consciousness.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung
"On the Nature' of the Psyche," CW 8, pars. 41 7f.
"When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one's life. One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin.
The more an archetype is amplified the more understandable it becomes.
It is hard to explain because the spiritual cannot be expressed in a few words.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness. Archetypes are not matters of faith; we can know that they are there.
An archetype is composed of an instinctual factor and a spiritual image. The approaches to it from the instinctual or the spiritual side are very different.
The libido cannot be freed, however, unless the archetypal images can be made conscious.
When fantasy pictures are brought into consciousness their intrinsic energy is liberated.
In this way the instincts become integrated and ordered.
When only the instinctual element of the archetypal content is active there is chaos (massa confusa).
Archetypes can change whilst the individual remains quite unconscious of their movements.
Conceivable they change spontaneously. The archetypal content of dreams disappears and is replaced by a new one, even when the earlier form has not come into consciousness.
From the nature of a particular archetype it is possible to predict which will follow it.
It can be assumed that the flow of archetypes at a particular time characterize that historical period in a particular way.
The typical events of an era are determined by the succession and the quality of the corresponding archetypal images.
The succession of the archetypal motives is a collective development and has nothing to do with the individual.
We may imagine that the archetypes, being only the residual deposits of human experiences, would have represented animalistic life in an earlier period.
The archetypal primordial forms were already present, however, at the dawn of human consciousness; at its centre, everything was already there as an apriori possibility.
Even the first experiences of man were already fixed; we can only translate these patterns, these archetypes, into form we can understand.
Men have to realize the archetypes which are present at an unconscious level in creation.
All potentialities lie in the unconscious like ideas that have not yet been embodied nor experienced yet as reality.
The archetypes are present in the unconscious as potential abilities which, at a given moment, are realized and applied when brought into consciousness by a creative act.
As an analogy we can suppose that every inspiration produced out of the unconscious has a history.
A new situation occurs as a constellation produced by the archetype, a new inspiration emerges, and something else is discovered and becomes a part of reality.
A host of possibilities is still embedded in the archetypes, in the realm of the Mothers.
The abundance of possibilities eludes our comprehension.
The origin of the archetypes is a crucial question. Where space and time are relative it is not possible to speak of developments in time.
Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the pleroma.
I remember standing on a mountain top in Kenya Africa, seeing around me an endless expanse of brush and herds of animals grazing, all in a deep silence as it had been for thousands of years without anyone being aware of it.
"They" were present but not consciously seen; they were as nameless as in Paradise before Adam named them.
Name-giving is an act of creation.
Where space and time do not exist there is only oneness (monofes). There is no differentiation; there is only pleroma.
Pleroma is always with us, under our feet and above our heads.
Man is the point that has become visible, stepping out from the pleroma, knowing what he is doing, and able to name the things about him.
Although the earth existed before there were any human beings, it could not be seen or known by anyone.
In China they say that the ancestor of the family, the one who stood at the beginning, is the Cosmos. Out of him was everything created in the time before time. There is nothing to explain or distinguish in the oneness because sequence and causality do not exist.
The archetypes are the material of the God- Creator. They constitute a primeval ocean charged with potentiality. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung, Archetypes, Pages 21-22.
"If you follow Jung, each archetype, creating a pattern of behavior and a model image, informs the conscience and consciousness has its own style ... because consciousness refers to a process that has more to do with the images that with the will, most with the reflection than the ordering activity, with the thoughtful look which penetrates into the "objective reality" rather than by manipulating the same. " --James Hillman
I have often been asked where the archetype comes from and whether it is acquired or not. This question cannot be answered directly.
Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce.
They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general.
They may be compared to the invisible presence of the crystal lattice in a saturated solution.
As a priori conditioning factors they represent a special, psychological instance of the biological "pattern of behavior," which gives all living organisms their specific qualities. Just as the manifestations of this biological ground plan may change in the course of development, so also can those of the archetype.
Empirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic life, but entered into the picture with life itself. ~"A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity" (1942). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P. 222
Just as the "psychic infra-red," the biological instinctual psyche, gradually passes over into the physiology of the organism and thus merges with its chemical and physical conditions, so the "psychic ultra-violet," the archetype, describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic. ~Carl Jung; On the Nature of the Psyche; CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche; Page 420.
The Unconscious: Archetypes
Evans: You mentioned earlier that Freud's Oedipal situation was an example of an archetype. At this time would you please elaborate on the concept, archetype?
Jung: Well, you know what a behavior pattern is, the way in which a weaver bird builds its nest. That is an inherited form in him. He will apply certain symbiotic phenomena, between insects and plants. They are inherited patterns of behavior. And so man has, of course, an inherited scheme of functioning. You see, his liver, his heart, all his organs, and his brain will always function in a certain way, following its pattern. You may have a great difficulty seeing it because you cannot compare it. There are no other similar beings like man, that are articulate, that could give an account of their functioning. If that were the case, we could—I don't know what. But because we have no means of comparison, we are necessarily unconscious about the whole conditions.
It is quite certain, however, that man is born with a certain functioning, a certain way of functioning, a certain pattern of behavior which is expressed in the form of archetypal images, or archetypal forms. For instance, the way in which a man should behave is expressed by an archetype. Therefore, you see, the primitives tell such stories. A great deal of education goes through story- telling. For instance, they call together the young men, and two older men act out before the eyes of the younger all the things they should not do. Then they say, "Now that's exactly the thing you shall not do.” Another way is they tell them all of the things they should not do, like the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not," and that is always supported by mythological tales.
That, of course, gave me a motive to study the archetypes, because I began to see that the structure of what I then called the collective unconscious was really a sort of agglomeration of such typical images, each of which had a unique quality.
The archetypes are, at the same time, dynamic. They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented. They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that one could best compare with myths. That's the origin of mythology. Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes.
So the statements of every religion, of many poets, etc., are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things. For instance, our ancestors have done so and so, and so shall you do. Or such and such a hero has done so and so, and that is your model. For instance, in the teachings of the Catholic church, there are several thousand saints. They show us how to do— They have their legends— And that is Christian mythology.
In Greece, you know, there was Theseus and there was Heracles, models of fine men, of gentlemen, you know; and they teach us how to behave. They are archetypes of behavior. I became more and more respectful of archetypes, and that naturally led me on to a profound study of them. And now, by Jove, there is an enormous factor, very important for our further development and for our well-being, that should be taken into account.
It was, of course, difficult to know where to begin, because it is such an enormously extended field. And the next question I asked myself was, "Now, where in the world has anybody been busy with that problem?" I found that nobody had except a peculiar spiritual movement that went together with the beginning of Christianity, namely, the Gnostics; and that was the first thing actually that I saw. They were concerned with the problem of archetypes, and made a peculiar philosophy of it. Everybody makes a peculiar philosophy of it when he comes across it naively, and doesn't know that those are structural elements of the unconscious psyche. The Gnostics lived in the first, second and third centuries; and I wanted to know what was in between that time and today, when we suddenly are confronted by the problems of the collective unconscious which were the same two thousand years ago, though we are not prepared to admit that problem. I was always looking for something in between, you know, something that would link that remote past with the present moment.
I found to my amazement that it was alchemy, that which is understood to be a history of chemistry. It was, one could almost say, nothing less than that. It was a peculiar spiritual movement or a philosophical movement. They called themselves philosophers, like Narcissism.
And then I read the whole accessible literature, Latin and Greek. I studied it because it was enormously interesting. It is the mental work of 1,700 years, in which there is stored up all they could make out about the nature of the archetypes, in a peculiar way that's foolish. It is not simple. Most of the texts are no more published since the middle ages, the last editions dated in the middle or the end of the sixteenth century, all in Latin; some texts are in Greek, not a few very important ones. That has given me no end of work, but the result was most satisfactory, because it showed me the development of our unconscious relation to the collective unconscious and the variations our consciousness has undergone; why the being's unconscious is concerned with these mythological images.
For instance, such phenomena as in Hitler, you know. That is a psychical phenomenon, and we've got to understand these things. To me, of course, it has been an enormous problem because it is a factor that has determined the fate of millions of European people, and of Americans. Nobody can deny that he has been influenced by the war. That was all Hitler's doing—and that's all psychology, our foolish psychology. But you only come to an understanding of these things when you understand the background from which it springs. It is just as though, as if a terrific epidemic of typhoid fever were breaking out, and you say, "That is typhoid fever— isn't that a marvelous disease!" It can take on enormous dimensions and nobody knows anything about it. Nobody takes care of the water supply, nobody thinks of examining the meat or anything like that; but everyone simply states, "This is a phenomenon.” —Yes, but one doesn't understand it.
Of course, I cannot tell you in detail about alchemy. It is the basic of our modern way of conceiving things, and therefore, it is as if it were right under the threshold of consciousness. This is a wonderful picture of how the development of archetypes, the movement of archetypes, looks when you look upon them with broader perspective. Maybe from today you look back into the past and you see how the present moment has evolved out of the past. It is just as if the alchemistic philosophy— That sounds very curious; we should give it an entirely different name. Actually, it has a different name. It is also called Hermetic Philosophy, though, of course, that conveys just as little as the term alchemy. —It was the parallel development, as Narcissism was, to the conscious development of Christianity, of our Christian philosophy, of the whole psychology of the middle ages.
So you see, in our days we have such and such a view of the world, a particular philosophy, but in the unconscious we have a different one. That we can see through the example of the alchemistic philosophy that behaves to the medieval consciousness exactly like the unconscious behaves to ourselves. And we can construct or even predict the unconscious of our days when we know what it has been yesterday.
Or, for instance, to take a more concise archetype, like the archetype of the ford—the ford to a river. Now that is a whole situation. You have to cross a ford; you are in the water; and there is an ambush or a water animal, say a crocodile or something like that. There is danger and something is going to happen. The problem is how you escape. Now this is a whole situation and it makes an archetype. And that archetype has now a suggestive effect upon you. For instance, you get into a situation; you don't know what the situation is; you suddenly are seized by an emotion or by a spell; and you behave in a certain way you have not foreseen at all—you do something quite strange to yourself.
Evans: Could this also be described as spontaneous?
Jung: Quite spontaneous. And that is done through the archetype that is concerned. Of course, we have a famous case in our Swiss history of the King Albrecht, who was murdered in the ford of the Royce not very far from Zurich. His murderers were hiding behind him for the whole stretch from Zurich to the Royce, quite a long stretch, and after deliberating, still couldn't come together about whether they wanted to kill the king or not. The moment the king rode into the ford, they thought, "Murder!" They shouted, "Why do we let him abuse us?" Then they killed him, because this was the moment they were seized; this was the right moment. So you see, when you have lived in primitive circumstances, in the primeval forest among primitive populations, then you know that phenomenon. You are seized with a certain spell and you do a thing that is unexpected.
Several times when I was in Africa, I went into such situations where I was amazed afterwards. One day I was in the Sudan and it was really a very dangerous situation, which I didn't recognize at the moment at all. But I was seized with a spell. I did something which I wouldn't have expected and I couldn't have intended.
You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure. So, for instance, falling in love at first sight, that is such a case. You have a certain image in yourself, without knowing it, of the woman—of any woman. You see that girl, or at least a good imitation of your type, and instantly you get the seizure; you are caught. And after- ward you may discover that it was a hell of a mistake. You see, a man is quite capable, or is intelligent enough to see that the woman of his choice was no choice; he has been captured! He sees that she is no good at all, that she is a hell of a business, and he tells me so. He says, "For God's sake, doctor, help me to get rid of that woman.” He can't though, and he is like clay in her fingers. That is the archetype. It has all happened because of the archetype of the anima, though he thinks it is all his soul, you know. It is like the girl—any girl. When a man sings very high, for instance, sings a high C, she thinks he must have a very wonderful spiritual character, and she is badly disappointed when she marries that particular "letter.” Well, that's the archetype of the animus.
Evans: Now Dr. Jung, to be even a bit more specific, you have suggested that in our society, in all societies, there are symbols that in a sense direct or determine what a man does. Then you also suggest that somehow these symbols become "inborn" and, in part, "inbred.”
Jung: They don't become; they are. They are to begin with. You see, we are born into a pattern; we are a pattern. We are a structure that is preestablished through the genes.
Evans: To recapitulate then, the archetype is just a higher order of an instinctual pattern, such as your earlier example of a bird building a nest. Is that how you intended to describe it?
Jung: It is a biological order of our mental functioning, as, for instance, our biological-physiological function follows a pattern. The behavior of any bird or insect follows a pattern, and that is the same with us. Man has a certain pattern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it. We are only deeply unconscious of these facts because we live by all our senses and outside of ourselves. If a man could look into himself, he could discover it. When a man discovers it in our days, he thinks he is crazy—really crazy.
Evans: Now would you say the number of such archetypes are limited or predetermined, or can the number be increased?
Jung: Well, I don't know what I do know about it; it is so blurred. You see, we have no means of comparison. We know and we see that there is a behavior, say like incest; or there is a behavior of violence, a certain kind of violence; or there is a behavior of panic, of power, etc. Those are areas, as it were, in which there are many variations. It can be expressed in this way or that way, you know. And they overlap, and often you cannot say where the one form begins or ends.
It is nothing concise, because the archetype in itself is completely unconscious and you only can see the effects of it. You can see, for instance, when you know a person is possessed by an archetype; then you can divine and even prognosticate possible developments. This is true because when you see that the man is caught by a certain type of woman in a certain very specific way, you know that he is caught by the anima. Then the whole thing will have such and such complications and such and such developments because it is typical. The way the anima is described is exceedingly typical. I don't know if you know Rider Haggard's She, or L'Atlantideby Benoît—c'est la femme fatale.
Evans: To be more specific, Dr. Jung, you have used the concepts, anima and animus, which you are now identifying in terms of sex, male or female. I wonder if you could elaborate perhaps even more specifically on these terms? Take the term "anima" first. Is this again part of the inherited nature of the individual?
Jung: Well, this is a bit complicated, you know. The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of feminine or female genes. That is something that doesn't appear or disappear in him, that is constantly present, and works as a female in a man.
As early as the 16th century, the Humanists had discovered that man had an anima, and that each man carried female within himself. They said it; it is not a modem invention. The same is the case with the animus. It is a masculine image in a woman's mind which is sometimes quite conscious, sometimes not quite conscious; but it is called into life the moment that woman meets a man who says the right things. Then because he says it, it is all true and he is the fellow, no matter what he is. Those are particularly well-founded archetypes, those two. And you can lay hands on their bases. ~Conversations with Carl Jung and Richard Evans
http://gnosis.org/Evans-Jung-Interview/evans3.html
Johfra Bosschart, Anima & Animus
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The wise old woman may appear as a grandmother; one's mother in old age; a goddess; a female figure depicting fertility; naked female with large breasts, vagina or buttocks; queen or princess; sybil, seer, sage, oracle, old woman who radiates wisdom, authority and unconditional love -- cultural or universal experience.
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The wise old man appears as a king; magician; prophet; guru; guide; god; sage; authority figure; counselor, philosopher, priest, professor, judge, head-master, doctor, alchemist, medicine man, sorcerer, wizard, necromancer, warlock, or any older man, radiating insight or power, creating in you a feeling of veneration -- cultural or universal experience.
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The Wise Old Woman and the Wise Old Man (in Jung's theory of analytical psychology) are archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. 'The "wise old woman"...[or] helpful "old woman" is a well-known symbol in myths and fairy tales for the wisdom of the eternal female nature'. The 'Wise Old Man, or some other very powerful aspect of eternal masculinity' is her male counterpart. The Wise Old Woman and Man is what Jung termed "Mana" personalities or "supraordinate" personalities, that stand for wholeness of the self: 'the mother ("Primordial Mother" and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinary personality...as the "self"'.
You can't protect your anima by Yoga exercises which only procure a conscious thrill, but you can protect her by catching the unconscious contents that well up from the depths of yourself. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 97.
You can't protect your anima by Yoga exercises which only procure a conscious thrill, but you can protect her by catching the unconscious contents that well up from the depths of yourself. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 97.
Carl Jung and The Anima and Animus
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success. The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Syzygy: Anima and animus.
Anima and Animus
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the "spiritual" sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the "world and woman," i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~"A Study in the Process of Individuation" (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559
• No man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humor to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: Page 29
• The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious.
The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations. As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis.
The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, and then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment. ~Archetypes of the collective unconscious. From Collected Works of C. G. Jung , Vol. 9, Part 1, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 3-41).
• The formulation of the archetypes is described as an empirically derived concept, like that of the atom; it is a concept based not only on medical evidence but on observations of mythical, religious and literary phenomena, these archetypes are considered to be primordial images, spontaneous products of the psyche which do not reflect any physical process, but are reflected in them.
It is noted that while the theories of materialism would explain the psyche as an epiphenomenon of chemical states in the brain, no proof has yet been found for this hypothesis; it is considered more reasonable to view psychic production as a generating rather than a generated factor.
The anima is the feminine aspect of the archetypal male/female duality whose projections in the external world can be traced through myth, philosophy and religious doctrine. This duality is often represented in mythical syzygy symbols, which are expressions of parental imagos; the singular power of this particular archetype is considered due to an unusually intense repression of unconscious material concerning the parental imagos. Archetypal images are described as preexistent, available and active from the moment of birth as possibilities of ideas which are subsequently elaborated by the individual.
The anima image in particular is seen to be active in childhood, projecting superhuman qualities on the mother before sinking back into the unconscious under the influence of external reality. In a therapeutic sense, the concept of the anima is considered critical to the understanding of male psychology. There is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time. Therefore we have to conclude that what we call psychological motives are in a way identical with star positions . . . We must form a peculiar hypothesis. This hypothesis says that the dynamics of our psyche is not just identical with the position of the stars . . . better to assume that it is a phenomenon of time - Carl G. Jung in 1929
• Although "wholeness" seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. [The Self, ibid” par. 59.]
• The "soul" which accrues to ego-consciousness during the opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman. His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate. [The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par. 522.]
• When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima - possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
• Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~"Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 62
• Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man." Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.338
• With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ["The Shadow, ibid” par. 19.]
• The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima; hence the "child" is such an apt formula for the symbol. The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality; it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness.
The deeper "layers" of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. "Lower down," that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence "at bottom" the psyche is simply "world."
In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and "deeper," that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more "material" it is. The more abstract, differentiated, and specified it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character. Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.291
The persona, the anima, and the little game of illusion that gives meaning to many lives due to getting incapacitated somehow the persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extroverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. - Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairy-tales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious. The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations.
As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis. The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment.
The result of a phenomenological study of psychic structure, consisting of the observance and description of the products of the unconscious, is described as the development of a psychological typology of situations and figures, called motifs, in the psychic processes of man. The principal types of motifs of the human figure include the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother as a supraordinate personality or a maiden, the anima in man and the animus in woman. One such motif is the Kore figure, belonging in man to the anima type and in woman to the supraordinate personality, or the self; like the other psychic figures, the Kore is observed to have both positive and negative manifestations. Images such as the Kore are considered to rise from an area of the personality which has an impersonal, collective nature, and to express this psychic material in the conscious. The experience of these archetypal expressions has the effect of widening the scope of consciousness. Several dream visions described by men and women are analyzed in their manifestations of the Kore symbol as supraordinate personality and anima. I reference. ~The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales. 1. Concerning the word "spirit." In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 207-214).
Anima and animus are both characterized by an extraordinary many-sidedness. In a marriage it is always the contained who projects this image upon the container, while the latter is only partially able to project his unconscious image upon his partner. The more unified and simple this partner is, the less complete the projection. In which case, this highly fascinating image hangs as it were in mid air, as though waiting to be filled out by a living person. There are certain types of women who seem to be made by nature to attract anima projections; indeed one could almost speak of a definite "anima type." The so-called "sphinxlike" character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness -- not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa. A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike, and yet endowed with a naive cunning that is extremely disarming to men. Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words -- words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the "misunderstood" class or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible to the sluggish wits of the man of "average intelligence." ~ (from Marriage as a Psychological Relationship
Anima and Animus C.J. Jung (1925):
“SOUL. [psyche, personality, persona, anima,] I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual.” (CW6, §797)
“The name’s people give to their experiences are often very revealing. What is the origin of the word Seele? Like the English word soul, it comes from the Gothic saiwalu and the old German saiwalô, and these can be connected etymologically with the Greek aiolos, ‘quick-moving, twinkling, iridescent’. The Greek word psyche also means ‘butterfly’. Saiwalô is related on the other side in the Old Slavonic sila, ‘strength’. These connections throw light on the original meaning of the word soul; it is moving force, that is, life-force.
The- Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, arc the same as the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneuma , also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,‘breath’. In Arabic, ‘wind’ is rih, and rüh is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bellows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body.” (CW8, § 663&664)
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success. The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Syzygy: Anima and animus.
Anima and Animus
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the "spiritual" sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the "world and woman," i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~"A Study in the Process of Individuation" (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559
• No man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humor to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: Page 29
• The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious.
The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations. As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis.
The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, and then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment. ~Archetypes of the collective unconscious. From Collected Works of C. G. Jung , Vol. 9, Part 1, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 3-41).
• The formulation of the archetypes is described as an empirically derived concept, like that of the atom; it is a concept based not only on medical evidence but on observations of mythical, religious and literary phenomena, these archetypes are considered to be primordial images, spontaneous products of the psyche which do not reflect any physical process, but are reflected in them.
It is noted that while the theories of materialism would explain the psyche as an epiphenomenon of chemical states in the brain, no proof has yet been found for this hypothesis; it is considered more reasonable to view psychic production as a generating rather than a generated factor.
The anima is the feminine aspect of the archetypal male/female duality whose projections in the external world can be traced through myth, philosophy and religious doctrine. This duality is often represented in mythical syzygy symbols, which are expressions of parental imagos; the singular power of this particular archetype is considered due to an unusually intense repression of unconscious material concerning the parental imagos. Archetypal images are described as preexistent, available and active from the moment of birth as possibilities of ideas which are subsequently elaborated by the individual.
The anima image in particular is seen to be active in childhood, projecting superhuman qualities on the mother before sinking back into the unconscious under the influence of external reality. In a therapeutic sense, the concept of the anima is considered critical to the understanding of male psychology. There is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time. Therefore we have to conclude that what we call psychological motives are in a way identical with star positions . . . We must form a peculiar hypothesis. This hypothesis says that the dynamics of our psyche is not just identical with the position of the stars . . . better to assume that it is a phenomenon of time - Carl G. Jung in 1929
• Although "wholeness" seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. [The Self, ibid” par. 59.]
• The "soul" which accrues to ego-consciousness during the opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman. His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate. [The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par. 522.]
• When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima - possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
• Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~"Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 62
• Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man." Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.338
• With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ["The Shadow, ibid” par. 19.]
• The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima; hence the "child" is such an apt formula for the symbol. The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality; it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness.
The deeper "layers" of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. "Lower down," that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence "at bottom" the psyche is simply "world."
In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and "deeper," that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more "material" it is. The more abstract, differentiated, and specified it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character. Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.291
The persona, the anima, and the little game of illusion that gives meaning to many lives due to getting incapacitated somehow the persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extroverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. - Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairy-tales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious. The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations.
As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis. The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment.
The result of a phenomenological study of psychic structure, consisting of the observance and description of the products of the unconscious, is described as the development of a psychological typology of situations and figures, called motifs, in the psychic processes of man. The principal types of motifs of the human figure include the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother as a supraordinate personality or a maiden, the anima in man and the animus in woman. One such motif is the Kore figure, belonging in man to the anima type and in woman to the supraordinate personality, or the self; like the other psychic figures, the Kore is observed to have both positive and negative manifestations. Images such as the Kore are considered to rise from an area of the personality which has an impersonal, collective nature, and to express this psychic material in the conscious. The experience of these archetypal expressions has the effect of widening the scope of consciousness. Several dream visions described by men and women are analyzed in their manifestations of the Kore symbol as supraordinate personality and anima. I reference. ~The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales. 1. Concerning the word "spirit." In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 207-214).
Anima and animus are both characterized by an extraordinary many-sidedness. In a marriage it is always the contained who projects this image upon the container, while the latter is only partially able to project his unconscious image upon his partner. The more unified and simple this partner is, the less complete the projection. In which case, this highly fascinating image hangs as it were in mid air, as though waiting to be filled out by a living person. There are certain types of women who seem to be made by nature to attract anima projections; indeed one could almost speak of a definite "anima type." The so-called "sphinxlike" character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness -- not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa. A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike, and yet endowed with a naive cunning that is extremely disarming to men. Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words -- words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the "misunderstood" class or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible to the sluggish wits of the man of "average intelligence." ~ (from Marriage as a Psychological Relationship
Anima and Animus C.J. Jung (1925):
“SOUL. [psyche, personality, persona, anima,] I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual.” (CW6, §797)
“The name’s people give to their experiences are often very revealing. What is the origin of the word Seele? Like the English word soul, it comes from the Gothic saiwalu and the old German saiwalô, and these can be connected etymologically with the Greek aiolos, ‘quick-moving, twinkling, iridescent’. The Greek word psyche also means ‘butterfly’. Saiwalô is related on the other side in the Old Slavonic sila, ‘strength’. These connections throw light on the original meaning of the word soul; it is moving force, that is, life-force.
The- Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, arc the same as the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneuma , also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,‘breath’. In Arabic, ‘wind’ is rih, and rüh is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bellows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body.” (CW8, § 663&664)
PARENTAL IMAGES
In Jung's view, 'all archetypes spontaneously develop favorable and unfavorable, light and dark, good and bad effects'. Thus 'the "good Wise Man" must here be contrasted with a correspondingly dark, chthonic figure', and in the same way, the priestess or sibyl has her counterpart in the figure of 'the witch...called by Jung the "terrible mother"'. Taken together, male and female, 'The hunter or old magician and the witch correspond to the negative parental images in the magic world of the unconscious'.
But judgement of such collective archetypes must not be hasty. 'Just as all archetypes have a positive, favorable, bright side that points upwards, so also they have one that points downwards, partly negative and unfavorable, partly chthonic' - so that (for example) 'the sky-woman is the positive, the bear the negative aspect of the "supraordinate personality", which extends the conscious human being upwards into the celestial and downwards into the animal regions'. Yet both aspects, celestial and chthonic, were (at least potentially) of equal value for Jung, as he sought for what he termed a "coniunctio oppositorum", a union of opposites. 'One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light', he argued, 'but by making the darkness conscious'. Similarly with respect to the goal of the individuation process itself, 'as a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither'. Coming to terms with the Mana figures of the collective unconscious - with the parental imagos - thus meant overcoming a psychic splitting, so as to make possible an acceptance of 'the Twisted side of the Great Mother'; an acceptance of the way 'the father contains both Kings at once...the Twisted King and the Whole King'.
In the dreams of a woman this center of personality is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
Jung described the masculine initiator as 'a figure of the same sex corresponding to the father-imago...the mana-personality -- a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits'. Similarly, 'the wise Old Woman figure represented by Hecate or the Crone ...the Great Mother' stood for an aspect of the mother-imago. The archetypes of the collective unconscious can thus be seen as inner representations of the same-sex parent - as an 'imago built up from parental influences plus the specific reactions of the child'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Old_Man_and_Wise_Old_Woman
Cosmic Blueprints
Archetypes can be compared to a blueprint or a genetic code, representing predetermined plans for the structure, function and development of each aspect of human life. These archetypal patterns are the common foundations of our personality traits, drives, feelings, beliefs, motivations and actions. Archetypes involve all aspects of our lives.
Archetypes are structuring principles/numinous fields/forms of indefinable content which, when manifest, will express that content through symbol (image). Jung affirms the symbol as grounded in the unconscious archetype while their manifest forms are shaped by the ideas harboring in the conscious mind (the "I" value). The archetype, therefore, is a structuring principle that is itself without a structure. This is why the notion of a field works well with archetypes. The archetype of Light is the personifications of the field itself.
Von Franz observes that the archetypes are interconnected in a continuous field. A field can be understood as a region or space where something happens. If each archetype has as its "energetic component" a field can store and shape information, matter, and behavior. So, we can hypothesize that the archetypal field serves as the ground of being or the ground of creation from which form arises. While an electromagnetic or gravitational field is space and time dependent, an archetypal field appears to be "nonlocal"-- not limited to the mandates of space and time.
An archetype is a primary patterning upon which manifestation organizes itself in self-similar formulae recurring in human experience. They work through the creation of attractors -- complexes, magnetic epicenters creating the convergence of archetypal potentialities into singularities, highly patterned behavioral tendencies that draw specific facets of archetypes. Entelechy is all about the possibilities encoded in each of us. This entelechy principle can be expressed symbolically as a god or a guide. We feel its presence as the inspiration or motivation that helps us get life moving again after times of stress or stagnation.
In Jung's view, 'all archetypes spontaneously develop favorable and unfavorable, light and dark, good and bad effects'. Thus 'the "good Wise Man" must here be contrasted with a correspondingly dark, chthonic figure', and in the same way, the priestess or sibyl has her counterpart in the figure of 'the witch...called by Jung the "terrible mother"'. Taken together, male and female, 'The hunter or old magician and the witch correspond to the negative parental images in the magic world of the unconscious'.
But judgement of such collective archetypes must not be hasty. 'Just as all archetypes have a positive, favorable, bright side that points upwards, so also they have one that points downwards, partly negative and unfavorable, partly chthonic' - so that (for example) 'the sky-woman is the positive, the bear the negative aspect of the "supraordinate personality", which extends the conscious human being upwards into the celestial and downwards into the animal regions'. Yet both aspects, celestial and chthonic, were (at least potentially) of equal value for Jung, as he sought for what he termed a "coniunctio oppositorum", a union of opposites. 'One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light', he argued, 'but by making the darkness conscious'. Similarly with respect to the goal of the individuation process itself, 'as a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither'. Coming to terms with the Mana figures of the collective unconscious - with the parental imagos - thus meant overcoming a psychic splitting, so as to make possible an acceptance of 'the Twisted side of the Great Mother'; an acceptance of the way 'the father contains both Kings at once...the Twisted King and the Whole King'.
In the dreams of a woman this center of personality is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
Jung described the masculine initiator as 'a figure of the same sex corresponding to the father-imago...the mana-personality -- a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits'. Similarly, 'the wise Old Woman figure represented by Hecate or the Crone ...the Great Mother' stood for an aspect of the mother-imago. The archetypes of the collective unconscious can thus be seen as inner representations of the same-sex parent - as an 'imago built up from parental influences plus the specific reactions of the child'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Old_Man_and_Wise_Old_Woman
Cosmic Blueprints
Archetypes can be compared to a blueprint or a genetic code, representing predetermined plans for the structure, function and development of each aspect of human life. These archetypal patterns are the common foundations of our personality traits, drives, feelings, beliefs, motivations and actions. Archetypes involve all aspects of our lives.
Archetypes are structuring principles/numinous fields/forms of indefinable content which, when manifest, will express that content through symbol (image). Jung affirms the symbol as grounded in the unconscious archetype while their manifest forms are shaped by the ideas harboring in the conscious mind (the "I" value). The archetype, therefore, is a structuring principle that is itself without a structure. This is why the notion of a field works well with archetypes. The archetype of Light is the personifications of the field itself.
Von Franz observes that the archetypes are interconnected in a continuous field. A field can be understood as a region or space where something happens. If each archetype has as its "energetic component" a field can store and shape information, matter, and behavior. So, we can hypothesize that the archetypal field serves as the ground of being or the ground of creation from which form arises. While an electromagnetic or gravitational field is space and time dependent, an archetypal field appears to be "nonlocal"-- not limited to the mandates of space and time.
An archetype is a primary patterning upon which manifestation organizes itself in self-similar formulae recurring in human experience. They work through the creation of attractors -- complexes, magnetic epicenters creating the convergence of archetypal potentialities into singularities, highly patterned behavioral tendencies that draw specific facets of archetypes. Entelechy is all about the possibilities encoded in each of us. This entelechy principle can be expressed symbolically as a god or a guide. We feel its presence as the inspiration or motivation that helps us get life moving again after times of stress or stagnation.
“The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree… the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven-the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible.” (Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 198)
The archetype itself is an “empty program” or potential that needs life-experience to fill it out, which wires the brain to local and cultural lifestyles. They manifest as positive and negative complexes in the personal psyche. Archetypes are usually experienced as powerful emotions due to hormones and autonomic nervous system activity. In myths, we see archetypal situations and some of the options which can be manifest. Examples of archetypes are “the wise old man/woman” ‘the tree of life,’ ’the journey,’ and ’home.’
Jung was especially interested in the archetypal processes that were “compensatory”. The ancient ancestors are still alive within the deepest ranges of our psyches. In archetypal psychology, the archetypes, "structures in process" so crucial to Jungian psychology, are released from being an archetype ~in~ us and seen more as an adjective than a noun, an encounter that finds its expression in all aspects of life. It is recognized as being prior and more fundamental to life than any individual psyche. The archetypal school brings into question a wide variety of Jungian concepts, including the Self, the Heroic ego, representations, symbols and many other ideas. The archetypal school sees soul more in its direction of depth, not the rising heights of spirit.
“From this perspective,” say Hillman “the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.” (Re-Visioning, ix) Since our life is already psychological, it behooves us to find the connection between this psyche/soul and the world, and a place for soul in this world. Just noticing is not enough, some encountering is needed. “…it is not enough to evoke soul and sing its praises. The job of psychology is to offer a way and find a place for soul within its own field. For this we need basic psychological ideas. “ (Re-Visioning, ix)
But what is the soul? “By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.” (Re-Visioning, x) Wherever there is an encounter, there is a something that comes between the encounter and me. Soul-making is opening up this middle ground between. “In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggested that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experience, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.” (Re-Visioning, x).
Three modes of soul then emerge:
1. Soul as the deepening of events into experience.
2. The soul has a relation with death, and hence love and spirituality.
3. The imaginative possibility of our nature. Reflective speculation, dream, imagery and fantasy. Imagination, depth, symbolic, metaphorical realm.
When we talk about the appearance of archetypes as people in dreams or in imaginative spaces, then the ~persons~ of archetypes emerge, the phantasmagoria, the mythical figures, the daimones, and gods. When discussed in terms of symptoms and affect, they are discussed as the styles of suffering (paranoid, borderline, phobic). When discussed as ideas, they express the intellectual psyche. That is, they express themselves as ideas important to soul. “ A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence, and a set of ideas.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning, 103)
If these imaginal beings are not in my psyche, where are they? Scholar Henry Corbin contributes a concept from Islamic mysticism, the mundus imaginalis, which is an imaginal realm between the subjective and objective. This realm is filled with imaginal beings, who may take the shape of our own complexes in our dreams. We see, for example, our mother in our dream, but its not our literal mother. Rather it is an imaginal being that has taken on the look and act of our personal mother, attracted, we might say, by our mother complex. (Corbin, 1969)
Corbin’s placing of archetypal realities in the middle zone of reality reveals the archetype as accessible to imagination first. First when it presents itself as image and so the whole procedure of archetypal psychology becomes imaginative, its tools rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning beyond logic and it goal other than social adaptation or traditional mental health. In terms of therapeutic work, the goal is to restore the person to imaginal realities long since repressed by the culture. That is, the aim is the development of a sense of soul as the middle ground of reality, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination. (Archetypal Psychology)
This imaginal realm plays itself out in culture as well as our dreams. We can see the state of our souls in the buildings and architecture of our cities, in the parks and choices of cars, in the way we inhabit and decorate our houses. (City as Dwelling, 1980) “Inner” is a way of seeing these events more than something literally inside us or them. The depth that we bring to an event has more to do with the way we encounter it than something inherent held inside. To the degree that the world is just a means to some other end, it will seem sterile and mechanical. To the degree “ we give it meaning, it will reveal to us its significance”. (Avens, 1984). Soul, the deepening of events into experiences.
And so things get turned around in archetypal psychology. Reality is seen as various perspectives, or in other words , as so much imagination. Imagination takes on a new status of existing, and becomes reality. All our ways of seeing are imaginal, even our attempts to see without and beyond imagination. (Avens , 1980). It is a psychology that starts on the notion of a poetic basis of mind rather than the brain, language, developmental theory, social organization or behaviorism. Rather it starts with imagination.
Hillman traces the ancestral line of archetypal psychology leading back from Carl Jung “through Freud, Dilthly, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus—and with even more branches which have yet to be traced. Heraclitus lies near the roots of this ancestral tree of thought, since he was the earliest to take psyche as his archetypal first principle, to imagine soul in terms of flux and to speak of its depth without measure.” (Re-Visioning, xi)
It may be easier to talk about these ideas as archetypes, the soul’s relation with death, with body, the world, other souls, love, beauty, sickness, family, ancestors, power, history, time. It is there relationship to psyche that makes them archetypal and keeps them connected with soul. The souls that can’t find and generate ideas become lost, hollow, lacking in imagination.
The move is from the Collective Unconscious to the World Unconscious. This view includes the psychic reality of all phenomena as they manifest in the world. “The world unconscious is a deeper and wider dimension of the psyche than that of the personal or the collective unconscious. In the realm of the world unconscious, all creatures and things of the world are understood at interrelated and interconnected” (Aizenstat, 1995, 96)
So, in psychologizing, we look for the fantasy that is dominant in a time or space. There is no specific procedure for this. It may be through an historical examination of underlying causes, it may be a semiological analysis, it may be a philosophical debate. It may be through humor or art or love. But again, the process is one of de-literaling. Some mistakes we make in trying to hear metaphor include:
1. Abstract Liternalness. Theology and metaphysical often take as literal the most abstract of concepts. In this way they speak about soul, but are really avoiding soul in talk about redemption, truth, and ideals.
2. Body Liternalness. The body is always concrete, but not literal. The body engages in a wide variety of tasks which are concrete but not just literal, such as eating, dancing, copulating, fighting, running.
Steps in seeing-through
a. Psychologizing. What is going on here? What is this moment in my life and as I bring some reflective time into the moment, what becomes clear? This process may itself be infinitely deep. Once moment of clarity leading to the next darkness.
b. Deus abscounditus: As we begin to acknowledge the full depth of the encounter, we find ourselves guided by that something which always remains unknown, a hidden god. “who appears only in concealment” Re-Visioning, 140) and justifies the whole process.
c. Narration: as we elaborate the phenomena before us, we make a tale of it, and in telling this tale what is before us transforms. All explanations can be considered narratives and placed mythologically.
d. Ideas as tools: The way it all moves is through ideas, and these are then the eyes of the soul, the way it sees.
http://improverse.com/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2003_aug_archetypal_psychology.htm
Jung was especially interested in the archetypal processes that were “compensatory”. The ancient ancestors are still alive within the deepest ranges of our psyches. In archetypal psychology, the archetypes, "structures in process" so crucial to Jungian psychology, are released from being an archetype ~in~ us and seen more as an adjective than a noun, an encounter that finds its expression in all aspects of life. It is recognized as being prior and more fundamental to life than any individual psyche. The archetypal school brings into question a wide variety of Jungian concepts, including the Self, the Heroic ego, representations, symbols and many other ideas. The archetypal school sees soul more in its direction of depth, not the rising heights of spirit.
“From this perspective,” say Hillman “the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.” (Re-Visioning, ix) Since our life is already psychological, it behooves us to find the connection between this psyche/soul and the world, and a place for soul in this world. Just noticing is not enough, some encountering is needed. “…it is not enough to evoke soul and sing its praises. The job of psychology is to offer a way and find a place for soul within its own field. For this we need basic psychological ideas. “ (Re-Visioning, ix)
But what is the soul? “By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself.” (Re-Visioning, x) Wherever there is an encounter, there is a something that comes between the encounter and me. Soul-making is opening up this middle ground between. “In another attempt upon the idea of soul I suggested that the word refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experience, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.” (Re-Visioning, x).
Three modes of soul then emerge:
1. Soul as the deepening of events into experience.
2. The soul has a relation with death, and hence love and spirituality.
3. The imaginative possibility of our nature. Reflective speculation, dream, imagery and fantasy. Imagination, depth, symbolic, metaphorical realm.
When we talk about the appearance of archetypes as people in dreams or in imaginative spaces, then the ~persons~ of archetypes emerge, the phantasmagoria, the mythical figures, the daimones, and gods. When discussed in terms of symptoms and affect, they are discussed as the styles of suffering (paranoid, borderline, phobic). When discussed as ideas, they express the intellectual psyche. That is, they express themselves as ideas important to soul. “ A God is a manner of existence, an attitude toward existence, and a set of ideas.” (Hillman, Re-Visioning, 103)
If these imaginal beings are not in my psyche, where are they? Scholar Henry Corbin contributes a concept from Islamic mysticism, the mundus imaginalis, which is an imaginal realm between the subjective and objective. This realm is filled with imaginal beings, who may take the shape of our own complexes in our dreams. We see, for example, our mother in our dream, but its not our literal mother. Rather it is an imaginal being that has taken on the look and act of our personal mother, attracted, we might say, by our mother complex. (Corbin, 1969)
Corbin’s placing of archetypal realities in the middle zone of reality reveals the archetype as accessible to imagination first. First when it presents itself as image and so the whole procedure of archetypal psychology becomes imaginative, its tools rhetorical and poetic, its reasoning beyond logic and it goal other than social adaptation or traditional mental health. In terms of therapeutic work, the goal is to restore the person to imaginal realities long since repressed by the culture. That is, the aim is the development of a sense of soul as the middle ground of reality, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination. (Archetypal Psychology)
This imaginal realm plays itself out in culture as well as our dreams. We can see the state of our souls in the buildings and architecture of our cities, in the parks and choices of cars, in the way we inhabit and decorate our houses. (City as Dwelling, 1980) “Inner” is a way of seeing these events more than something literally inside us or them. The depth that we bring to an event has more to do with the way we encounter it than something inherent held inside. To the degree that the world is just a means to some other end, it will seem sterile and mechanical. To the degree “ we give it meaning, it will reveal to us its significance”. (Avens, 1984). Soul, the deepening of events into experiences.
And so things get turned around in archetypal psychology. Reality is seen as various perspectives, or in other words , as so much imagination. Imagination takes on a new status of existing, and becomes reality. All our ways of seeing are imaginal, even our attempts to see without and beyond imagination. (Avens , 1980). It is a psychology that starts on the notion of a poetic basis of mind rather than the brain, language, developmental theory, social organization or behaviorism. Rather it starts with imagination.
Hillman traces the ancestral line of archetypal psychology leading back from Carl Jung “through Freud, Dilthly, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus—and with even more branches which have yet to be traced. Heraclitus lies near the roots of this ancestral tree of thought, since he was the earliest to take psyche as his archetypal first principle, to imagine soul in terms of flux and to speak of its depth without measure.” (Re-Visioning, xi)
It may be easier to talk about these ideas as archetypes, the soul’s relation with death, with body, the world, other souls, love, beauty, sickness, family, ancestors, power, history, time. It is there relationship to psyche that makes them archetypal and keeps them connected with soul. The souls that can’t find and generate ideas become lost, hollow, lacking in imagination.
The move is from the Collective Unconscious to the World Unconscious. This view includes the psychic reality of all phenomena as they manifest in the world. “The world unconscious is a deeper and wider dimension of the psyche than that of the personal or the collective unconscious. In the realm of the world unconscious, all creatures and things of the world are understood at interrelated and interconnected” (Aizenstat, 1995, 96)
So, in psychologizing, we look for the fantasy that is dominant in a time or space. There is no specific procedure for this. It may be through an historical examination of underlying causes, it may be a semiological analysis, it may be a philosophical debate. It may be through humor or art or love. But again, the process is one of de-literaling. Some mistakes we make in trying to hear metaphor include:
1. Abstract Liternalness. Theology and metaphysical often take as literal the most abstract of concepts. In this way they speak about soul, but are really avoiding soul in talk about redemption, truth, and ideals.
2. Body Liternalness. The body is always concrete, but not literal. The body engages in a wide variety of tasks which are concrete but not just literal, such as eating, dancing, copulating, fighting, running.
Steps in seeing-through
a. Psychologizing. What is going on here? What is this moment in my life and as I bring some reflective time into the moment, what becomes clear? This process may itself be infinitely deep. Once moment of clarity leading to the next darkness.
b. Deus abscounditus: As we begin to acknowledge the full depth of the encounter, we find ourselves guided by that something which always remains unknown, a hidden god. “who appears only in concealment” Re-Visioning, 140) and justifies the whole process.
c. Narration: as we elaborate the phenomena before us, we make a tale of it, and in telling this tale what is before us transforms. All explanations can be considered narratives and placed mythologically.
d. Ideas as tools: The way it all moves is through ideas, and these are then the eyes of the soul, the way it sees.
http://improverse.com/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2003_aug_archetypal_psychology.htm
Arbor scientiae (Tree of Philosophy) by Raymon Lulle- c. 1500.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k79225g
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k79225g
In The Power of Myth, Campbell states, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
He points out that, “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor).
Archetypes are more than just socially constructed symbols. Jung did not subscribe to genetically-driven behavior, per se, and today's Jungians certainly do not. Archetypes arise from emotionally-charged aspects of our being. An archetypal understanding of events immediately changes our perception of them and ourselves. History repeats because it is an expression of human nature, which includes the mythic dimension.
As mediators archetypes help us deal with our enormous individual and global problems, the irrational and unconscious. We are given the age-old task of gaining wisdom without losing our potential. We have to remain open to chance and change, and the dance of opposites. It helps us deal with individual, social and cultural trauma, inflicted by events and media. Can they help us move through our protracted adolescence?
He points out that, “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor).
Archetypes are more than just socially constructed symbols. Jung did not subscribe to genetically-driven behavior, per se, and today's Jungians certainly do not. Archetypes arise from emotionally-charged aspects of our being. An archetypal understanding of events immediately changes our perception of them and ourselves. History repeats because it is an expression of human nature, which includes the mythic dimension.
As mediators archetypes help us deal with our enormous individual and global problems, the irrational and unconscious. We are given the age-old task of gaining wisdom without losing our potential. We have to remain open to chance and change, and the dance of opposites. It helps us deal with individual, social and cultural trauma, inflicted by events and media. Can they help us move through our protracted adolescence?
Memories, Dreams and Reflections]
Archetypal statements are based upon instinctive predictions and have nothing to do with reason; they are neither rationally grounded or can they be banished by rational arguments. They have always been part of the world scene-representations collectives, as Levy-Bruhl rightly called them. Certainly the ego and its will have a part to lay in life but what the ego wills is subject in the highest degree to the interference, in ways the ego is usually unaware, of the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. ~Carl Jung Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 353
Just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 326
Gradually only did I discover what the mandala really is: 'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation '.And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well, is harmonious but, which cannot tolerate self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Pages195-196.
Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these processes and collective transformation through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation .~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page.209.
Again and again, events occurred that made me out of my normal everyday life also pushed into the unlimited "God's world. “The expression "God's World" that sounds sentimental for some ears had not this character for me. For "God's World" was everything "superhuman", blinding light, and darkness of the abyss, the cold apathy of infinite time and space and the uncanny grotesque the irrational world of chance. "God" was all for me, not only edifying. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Closing lines of the preface.
I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "man-eater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections Page 14.
Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 41.
My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Page 72
If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention. Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes -- the second cosmogony [ed. note: what Teilhard de Chardin called the origin of the "noosphere," the layer of "mind"]. The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain -- found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 339.
"We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Page 236
"Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me." ~Carl Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact, it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"A dogma, an indisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to do with scientific judgment; only with a personal power drive." ~Carl Jung; "Memories, Dreams and Reflections"
"A fact which can [not] be scientifically verified . . . finds no place in an official view of the world." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"As far we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analysis is a dialogue demanding two partners. ... The doctor has something to say, but so has the patient." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, and Reflections
"Freud had a dream-I would not think it right to air the problem it involved. I interpreted it as best I could, but added that a great deal more could be said about it if he would supply me with some additional details from his private life. Freud's response to these words was a curious look-a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he said, "But I cannot risk my authority!" At that moment he lost it altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, if had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God." ~Carl Jung; "Memories, Dreams and Reflections"
"I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"I prefer the term "the unconscious," knowing that I might equally well speak of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express myself in mythic language." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
Archetypal statements are based upon instinctive predictions and have nothing to do with reason; they are neither rationally grounded or can they be banished by rational arguments. They have always been part of the world scene-representations collectives, as Levy-Bruhl rightly called them. Certainly the ego and its will have a part to lay in life but what the ego wills is subject in the highest degree to the interference, in ways the ego is usually unaware, of the autonomy and numinosity of archetypal processes. ~Carl Jung Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 353
Just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page 326
Gradually only did I discover what the mandala really is: 'Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind's eternal recreation '.And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well, is harmonious but, which cannot tolerate self-deceptions. ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Pages195-196.
Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these processes and collective transformation through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation .~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Page.209.
Again and again, events occurred that made me out of my normal everyday life also pushed into the unlimited "God's world. “The expression "God's World" that sounds sentimental for some ears had not this character for me. For "God's World" was everything "superhuman", blinding light, and darkness of the abyss, the cold apathy of infinite time and space and the uncanny grotesque the irrational world of chance. "God" was all for me, not only edifying. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Closing lines of the preface.
I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "man-eater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections Page 14.
Sometimes I had an overwhelming urge to speak, not about that, but only to hint that there were some curious things about me which no one knew of. I wanted to find out whether other people had undergone similar experiences. I never succeeded in discovering so much as a trace of them in others. As a result, I had the feeling that I was outlawed or elect, accursed or blessed. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 41.
My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. [...] In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Page 72
If the Creator were conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention. Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness intervenes -- the second cosmogony [ed. note: what Teilhard de Chardin called the origin of the "noosphere," the layer of "mind"]. The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain -- found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Page 339.
"We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Page 236
"Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me." ~Carl Jung Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact, it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"A dogma, an indisputable confession of faith, is set up only when the aim is to suppress doubts once and for all. But that no longer has anything to do with scientific judgment; only with a personal power drive." ~Carl Jung; "Memories, Dreams and Reflections"
"A fact which can [not] be scientifically verified . . . finds no place in an official view of the world." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"As far we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"The crucial point is that I confront the patient as one human being to another. Analysis is a dialogue demanding two partners. ... The doctor has something to say, but so has the patient." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, and Reflections
"Freud had a dream-I would not think it right to air the problem it involved. I interpreted it as best I could, but added that a great deal more could be said about it if he would supply me with some additional details from his private life. Freud's response to these words was a curious look-a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he said, "But I cannot risk my authority!" At that moment he lost it altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty, if had me. Nobody could rob me of the conviction that it was enjoined upon me to do what God wanted and not what I wanted. That gave me the strength to go my own way. Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God." ~Carl Jung; "Memories, Dreams and Reflections"
"I regret many follies which sprang from my obstinacy; but without that trait I would not have reached my goal." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"I prefer the term "the unconscious," knowing that I might equally well speak of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express myself in mythic language." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
"If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith. The ones who came to me were the lost sheep." ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams and Reflections
The Mother by Johfra Bosschart
It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfills itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Answer to Job, Page 409. Paragraph 648.
"An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors."
--Carl Jung
--Carl Jung
"It is relevant for psychologists and therapists to know basic physics,
because in experiential states clients report recognizable observations, symbols, and metaphors of the archetypal groundstate of consciousness that relate to healing and individuation. Our concept of archetypes needs to be expanded to include scientifically-informed gnosis of the plenum, the subquantum realm beyond the mystic veil of observability. Both physics and depth psychology describe an 'as if' reality, consistent with experience." --Iona Miller, Holographic Archetypes
because in experiential states clients report recognizable observations, symbols, and metaphors of the archetypal groundstate of consciousness that relate to healing and individuation. Our concept of archetypes needs to be expanded to include scientifically-informed gnosis of the plenum, the subquantum realm beyond the mystic veil of observability. Both physics and depth psychology describe an 'as if' reality, consistent with experience." --Iona Miller, Holographic Archetypes
Michael Divine, Illumination
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” (Jung, Cw 13, par. 54)
“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
“This feeling for the infinite can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!” ~ C. G. Jung
Michael Conforti says, “Archetypal fields appear to function non-locally. Their influence is not space-time dependent; and, from what we can tell, they are not subject to causal limitations, as are fields in the outer, natural world.” Yet thinking of archetypes as fields seems appropriate to him, because of the ability, or power, of archetypes to “effect, transform and possess individuals and cultures.”8
Archetypal fields underlie all of our psychic existence. He says, “…pattern recognition is essential for the preservation of life….Every individual is born with and continues developing these highly tuned perceptual skills that help to read patterns in the outer and hopefully in the inner world”
Some examples of archetypes that appear in all cultures are: The Great Mother, the Father, the Warrior, the King, and the Trickster. The Great Mother archetype, for example, expresses itself in the following ways: “the mother, the grandmother, the goddess, the Virgin Mary, Sophia, the church, the forest, the sea and nonflowing bodies of water, matter, the underworld, the moon, the tilled field, the garden, the boulder, the cave; whatever is kindly, sheltering, bearing, growth-fostering, fertility-bringing, nourishing-providing; rebirth; that which is secret, hidden, dark; that which devours, seduces, poisons, arouses fear; that which is inescapable.”
The Father archetype shows up as: moving air, wind, spirit breath, that which provokes possession, apparitions of the spirits of the dead; things like pneuma, the psyche, sprites, spirits, devils, demons, angels, the helpful old man, the wise professor, the authority figure, the priest; the active, winged, moving, alive, stimulating, provocative, arousing, inspiring, dynamic element of the psyche, that which produces enthusiasm and inspiration.”
http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/papers/frenier_imaginal.htm
Archetypal fields underlie all of our psychic existence. He says, “…pattern recognition is essential for the preservation of life….Every individual is born with and continues developing these highly tuned perceptual skills that help to read patterns in the outer and hopefully in the inner world”
Some examples of archetypes that appear in all cultures are: The Great Mother, the Father, the Warrior, the King, and the Trickster. The Great Mother archetype, for example, expresses itself in the following ways: “the mother, the grandmother, the goddess, the Virgin Mary, Sophia, the church, the forest, the sea and nonflowing bodies of water, matter, the underworld, the moon, the tilled field, the garden, the boulder, the cave; whatever is kindly, sheltering, bearing, growth-fostering, fertility-bringing, nourishing-providing; rebirth; that which is secret, hidden, dark; that which devours, seduces, poisons, arouses fear; that which is inescapable.”
The Father archetype shows up as: moving air, wind, spirit breath, that which provokes possession, apparitions of the spirits of the dead; things like pneuma, the psyche, sprites, spirits, devils, demons, angels, the helpful old man, the wise professor, the authority figure, the priest; the active, winged, moving, alive, stimulating, provocative, arousing, inspiring, dynamic element of the psyche, that which produces enthusiasm and inspiration.”
http://www.collectivewisdominitiative.org/papers/frenier_imaginal.htm
Martina Hoffmann
[Carl Jung and The Anima and Animus]
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success. The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Syzygy: Anima and animus.
Anima and Animus
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the "spiritual" sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the "world and woman," i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~"A Study in the Process of Individuation" (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559
• No man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humor to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: Page 29
• The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious.
The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations. As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis.
The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, and then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment. ~Archetypes of the collective unconscious. From Collected Works of C. G. Jung , Vol. 9, Part 1, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 3-41).
• The formulation of the archetypes is described as an empirically derived concept, like that of the atom; it is a concept based not only on medical evidence but on observations of mythical, religious and literary phenomena, these archetypes are considered to be primordial images, spontaneous products of the psyche which do not reflect any physical process, but are reflected in them.
It is noted that while the theories of materialism would explain the psyche as an epiphenomenon of chemical states in the brain, no proof has yet been found for this hypothesis; it is considered more reasonable to view psychic production as a generating rather than a generated factor.
The anima is the feminine aspect of the archetypal male/female duality whose projections in the external world can be traced through myth, philosophy and religious doctrine. This duality is often represented in mythical syzygy symbols, which are expressions of parental imagos; the singular power of this particular archetype is considered due to an unusually intense repression of unconscious material concerning the parental imagos. Archetypal images are described as preexistent, available and active from the moment of birth as possibilities of ideas which are subsequently elaborated by the individual.
The anima image in particular is seen to be active in childhood, projecting superhuman qualities on the mother before sinking back into the unconscious under the influence of external reality. In a therapeutic sense, the concept of the anima is considered critical to the understanding of male psychology. There is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time. Therefore we have to conclude that what we call psychological motives are in a way identical with star positions . . . We must form a peculiar hypothesis. This hypothesis says that the dynamics of our psyche is not just identical with the position of the stars . . . better to assume that it is a phenomenon of time - Carl G. Jung in 1929
• Although "wholeness" seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. [The Self, ibid” par. 59.]
• The "soul" which accrues to ego-consciousness during the opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman. His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate. [The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par. 522.]
• When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima - possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
• Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~"Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 62
• Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man." Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.338
• With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ["The Shadow, ibid” par. 19.]
• The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima; hence the "child" is such an apt formula for the symbol. The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality; it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness.
The deeper "layers" of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. "Lower down," that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence "at bottom" the psyche is simply "world."
In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and "deeper," that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more "material" it is. The more abstract, differentiated, and specified it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character. Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.291
The persona, the anima, and the little game of illusion that gives meaning to many lives due to getting incapacitated somehow the persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extroverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. - Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairy-tales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious. The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations.
As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis. The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment.
The result of a phenomenological study of psychic structure, consisting of the observance and description of the products of the unconscious, is described as the development of a psychological typology of situations and figures, called motifs, in the psychic processes of man. The principal types of motifs of the human figure include the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother as a supraordinate personality or a maiden, the anima in man and the animus in woman. One such motif is the Kore figure, belonging in man to the anima type and in woman to the supraordinate personality, or the self; like the other psychic figures, the Kore is observed to have both positive and negative manifestations. Images such as the Kore are considered to rise from an area of the personality which has an impersonal, collective nature, and to express this psychic material in the conscious. The experience of these archetypal expressions has the effect of widening the scope of consciousness. Several dream visions described by men and women are analyzed in their manifestations of the Kore symbol as supraordinate personality and anima. I reference. ~The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales. 1. Concerning the word "spirit." In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 207-214).
Anima and animus are both characterized by an extraordinary many-sidedness. In a marriage it is always the contained who projects this image upon the container, while the latter is only partially able to project his unconscious image upon his partner. The more unified and simple this partner is, the less complete the projection. In which case, this highly fascinating image hangs as it were in mid air, as though waiting to be filled out by a living person. There are certain types of women who seem to be made by nature to attract anima projections; indeed one could almost speak of a definite "anima type." The so-called "sphinxlike" character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness -- not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa. A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike, and yet endowed with a naive cunning that is extremely disarming to men. Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words -- words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the "misunderstood" class or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible to the sluggish wits of the man of "average intelligence." ~ (from Marriage as a Psychological Relationship
Anima and Animus C.J. Jung (1925):
“SOUL. [psyche, personality, persona, anima,] I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual.” (CW6, §797)
“The name’s people give to their experiences are often very revealing. What is the origin of the word Seele? Like the English word soul, it comes from the Gothic saiwalu and the old German saiwalô, and these can be connected etymologically with the Greek aiolos, ‘quick-moving, twinkling, iridescent’. The Greek word psyche also means ‘butterfly’. Saiwalô is related on the other side in the Old Slavonic sila, ‘strength’. These connections throw light on the original meaning of the word soul; it is moving force, that is, life-force.
The- Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, arc the same as the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneuma , also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,‘breath’. In Arabic, ‘wind’ is rih, and rüh is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bellows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body.” (CW8, § 663&664)
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition. Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind. This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys. The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success. The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work. Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Syzygy: Anima and animus.
Anima and Animus
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions. ~The Secret of the Golden Flower. (Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blute) 1929. Commentary by C.G. Jung in CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.60
• For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the "spiritual" sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the "world and woman," i.e., the anima projected on to the world. ~"A Study in the Process of Individuation" (1934) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 559
• No man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humor to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: Page 29
• The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairytales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious.
The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations. As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis.
The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, and then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment. ~Archetypes of the collective unconscious. From Collected Works of C. G. Jung , Vol. 9, Part 1, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 3-41).
• The formulation of the archetypes is described as an empirically derived concept, like that of the atom; it is a concept based not only on medical evidence but on observations of mythical, religious and literary phenomena, these archetypes are considered to be primordial images, spontaneous products of the psyche which do not reflect any physical process, but are reflected in them.
It is noted that while the theories of materialism would explain the psyche as an epiphenomenon of chemical states in the brain, no proof has yet been found for this hypothesis; it is considered more reasonable to view psychic production as a generating rather than a generated factor.
The anima is the feminine aspect of the archetypal male/female duality whose projections in the external world can be traced through myth, philosophy and religious doctrine. This duality is often represented in mythical syzygy symbols, which are expressions of parental imagos; the singular power of this particular archetype is considered due to an unusually intense repression of unconscious material concerning the parental imagos. Archetypal images are described as preexistent, available and active from the moment of birth as possibilities of ideas which are subsequently elaborated by the individual.
The anima image in particular is seen to be active in childhood, projecting superhuman qualities on the mother before sinking back into the unconscious under the influence of external reality. In a therapeutic sense, the concept of the anima is considered critical to the understanding of male psychology. There is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time. Therefore we have to conclude that what we call psychological motives are in a way identical with star positions . . . We must form a peculiar hypothesis. This hypothesis says that the dynamics of our psyche is not just identical with the position of the stars . . . better to assume that it is a phenomenon of time - Carl G. Jung in 1929
• Although "wholeness" seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical records of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. [The Self, ibid” par. 59.]
• The "soul" which accrues to ego-consciousness during the opus has a feminine character in the man and a masculine character in a woman. His anima wants to reconcile and unite; her animus tries to discern and discriminate. [The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par. 522.]
• When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.338.30
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
• As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima - possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.29
• Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. ~"Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 62
• Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image. This image is fundamentally unconscious; an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or "archetype" of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman-in short, an inherited system of psychic adaptation. Even if no women existed, it would still be possible, at any given time, to deduce from this unconscious image exactly how a woman would have to be constituted psychically. The same is true of the woman: she too has her inborn image of man." Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925) In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.338
• With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow-so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil. ["The Shadow, ibid” par. 19.]
• The symbol is a living body, corpus et anima; hence the "child" is such an apt formula for the symbol. The uniqueness of the psyche can never enter wholly into reality; it can only be realized approximately, though it still remains the absolute basis of all consciousness.
The deeper "layers" of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. "Lower down," that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence "at bottom" the psyche is simply "world."
In this sense I hold Kerenyi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the world itself is speaking. The more archaic and "deeper," that is the more physiological, the symbol is, the more collective and universal, the more "material" it is. The more abstract, differentiated, and specified it is, and the more its nature approximates to conscious uniqueness and individuality, the more it sloughs off its universal character. Having finally attained full consciousness, it runs the risk of becoming a mere allegory which nowhere oversteps the bounds of conscious comprehension, and is then exposed to all sorts of attempts at rationalistic and therefore inadequate explanation. ~"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.291
The persona, the anima, and the little game of illusion that gives meaning to many lives due to getting incapacitated somehow the persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e., the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extroverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weaknesses the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper.
If this results in a considerable increase of her power, she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life. - Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 (1957). "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" P.309
The concept of archetypes as the mode of expression of the collective unconscious is discussed. In addition to the purely personal unconscious hypothesized by Freud, a deeper unconscious level is felt to exist. This deeper level manifests itself in universal archaic images expressed in dreams, religious beliefs, myths, and fairy-tales.
The archetypes, as unfiltered psychic experience, appear sometimes in their most primitive and naive forms (in dreams), sometimes in a considerably more complex form due to the operation of conscious elaboration (in myths). Archetypal images expressed in religious dogma in particular are thoroughly elaborated into formalized structures which, while by expressing the unconscious in a circuitous manner, prevent direct confrontation with it. Since the Protestant Reformation rejected nearly all of the carefully constructed symbol structures, man has felt increasingly isolated and alone without his gods; at a loss to replenish his externalized symbols, he must turn to their source in the unconscious. The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man's hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations.
As archetypes penetrate consciousness, they influence the perceived experience of normal and neurotic people; a too powerful archetype may totally possess the individual and cause psychosis. The therapeutic process takes the unconscious archetypes into account in two ways: they are made as fully conscious as possible, then synthesized with the conscious by recognition and acceptance. It is observed that since modern man has a highly developed ability to dissociate, simple recognition may not be followed by appropriate action; it is thus felt that moral judgment and counsel is often required in the course of treatment.
The result of a phenomenological study of psychic structure, consisting of the observance and description of the products of the unconscious, is described as the development of a psychological typology of situations and figures, called motifs, in the psychic processes of man. The principal types of motifs of the human figure include the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother as a supraordinate personality or a maiden, the anima in man and the animus in woman. One such motif is the Kore figure, belonging in man to the anima type and in woman to the supraordinate personality, or the self; like the other psychic figures, the Kore is observed to have both positive and negative manifestations. Images such as the Kore are considered to rise from an area of the personality which has an impersonal, collective nature, and to express this psychic material in the conscious. The experience of these archetypal expressions has the effect of widening the scope of consciousness. Several dream visions described by men and women are analyzed in their manifestations of the Kore symbol as supraordinate personality and anima. I reference. ~The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales. 1. Concerning the word "spirit." In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1968. 451 p. (p. 207-214).
Anima and animus are both characterized by an extraordinary many-sidedness. In a marriage it is always the contained who projects this image upon the container, while the latter is only partially able to project his unconscious image upon his partner. The more unified and simple this partner is, the less complete the projection. In which case, this highly fascinating image hangs as it were in mid air, as though waiting to be filled out by a living person. There are certain types of women who seem to be made by nature to attract anima projections; indeed one could almost speak of a definite "anima type." The so-called "sphinxlike" character is an indispensable part of their equipment, also an equivocalness, an intriguing elusiveness -- not an indefinite blur that offers nothing, but an indefiniteness that seems full of promises, like the speaking silence of a Mona Lisa. A woman of this kind is both old and young, mother and daughter, of more than doubtful chastity, childlike, and yet endowed with a naive cunning that is extremely disarming to men. Not every man of real intellectual power can be an animus, for the animus must be a master not so much of fine ideas as of fine words -- words seemingly full of meaning which purport to leave a great deal unsaid. He must also belong to the "misunderstood" class or be in some way at odds with his environment, so that the idea of self-sacrifice can insinuate itself. He must be a rather questionable hero, a man with possibilities, which is not to say that an animus projection may not discover a real hero long before he has become perceptible to the sluggish wits of the man of "average intelligence." ~ (from Marriage as a Psychological Relationship
Anima and Animus C.J. Jung (1925):
“SOUL. [psyche, personality, persona, anima,] I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual.” (CW6, §797)
“The name’s people give to their experiences are often very revealing. What is the origin of the word Seele? Like the English word soul, it comes from the Gothic saiwalu and the old German saiwalô, and these can be connected etymologically with the Greek aiolos, ‘quick-moving, twinkling, iridescent’. The Greek word psyche also means ‘butterfly’. Saiwalô is related on the other side in the Old Slavonic sila, ‘strength’. These connections throw light on the original meaning of the word soul; it is moving force, that is, life-force.
The- Latin words animus, ‘spirit’, and anima, ‘soul’, arc the same as the Greek anemos, ‘wind’. The other Greek word for ‘wind’, pneuma , also means ‘spirit’. In Gothic we find the same word in us-anan, ‘to breathe out’, and in Latin it is anhelare, ‘to pant’. In Old High German, spiritus sanctus was rendered by atum,‘breath’. In Arabic, ‘wind’ is rih, and rüh is ‘soul, spirit’. The Greek word psyche has similar connections; it is related to psychein, ‘to breathe’, psychos, ‘cool’, psychros, ‘cold, chill’, and physa, ‘bellows’. These connections show clearly how in Latin, Greek, and Arabic the names given to the soul are related to the notion of moving air, the “cold breath of the spirits.” And this is probably the reason why the primitive view also endows the soul with an invisible breath-body.” (CW8, § 663&664)
Jung and Educational Theory edited by Inna Semetsky
"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... .Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James HIllman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"
Johfra- Unio Mystica
Wise Old Man, Andrew Judd
Are the gods real?
October 4, 2012 By John Halstead
Do we worship the same gods?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/allergicpagan/2012/10/04/are-the-gods-real/
But what happens when two people who worship the same god or goddess meet up and realize that they have very different conceptions of the deity? Are they worshiping the same god? Or two gods with the same name?
Our god of many faces
“On the one hand, I believe, with every fiber of my being, in the knowledge I have been made privy of by the Gods. I believe in my experiences and they are sacred to me. They run anywhere from synchronicious events to detailed biographies and some of them I will never share with anyone, they were that special. Throughout my practice, I have allowed UGP to push me forward in my path. [...]
“On the other hand, there is UPG out there that contradicts mine, that I personally think is completely incorrect or that questions everything I believe in. Needless to say, this is UPG I struggle with. I can’t view it as invalid; I respect everyone’s path too much for that, but where does it fit in with my believes? We are talking about the same Gods, right?”
(emphasis added).
Which Hecate am I talking to today?
From a polytheistic perspective, there are ways to explain this. If the gods are persons, then it is possible for the gods to interact with different people in different way, to present different “faces”, as it were — just as we ourselves present different “faces” to different people. In fact, we sometimes speak as if we are different people in different situations or with different company. Perhaps this is true of the gods as well.
But is there another explanation? Is it possible to provide an account for polytheistic experience that is consistent with a naturalistic premise? Is there a naturalistic explanation for polytheistic experience that does not pathologize the experience and is consistent with polytheists’ own descriptions of their experiences?
Gods as Archetypes
Both Jung and “archetypes” have fallen out of favor in contemporary Pagan discourse, but I believe that is because Jung’s ideas have been watered down so that the term “archetype” has (incorrectly) become synonymous with “metaphor”. In this Jung-lite approach, the archetypal gods understood as mere metaphors for nature. But this is not what Jung had in mind when he spoke of archetypes.
The archetypes, according to Jung (in his mature thought), are “dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life.” (“Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Collected Works, vol. 11). Jung saw the “gods” as anthropomorphic projections of the archetypes. The archetypes for Jung are ineffable and practically inexhaustible, characteristics that correlate with divine categories. Jung writes, “Psychologically speaking, the domain of ‘gods’ begins where consciousness leaves off [...]“ (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, Collected Works, vol. 11). He explains that the ruling powers of the psyche compels “the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from [humankind].”
“[...] we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity.” (“The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, vol. 11).
The archetypes are not metaphors. They are form without content, potentialities rather than actualities. Their existence can only be inferred from our experience of archetypal images, which are necessarily only partial expressions of the archetype.
Archetypes as “Other”
For Jung, the most powerful religious experiences are archetypal experiences. This was not a reductive claim, as Jung believed that the religious quest was the most meaningful aspect of human experience. Archetypal experience is “numinous”, a term Jung borrowed from Rudolf Otto. According to Otto, the essential characteristic of the “numinous” is that it is mysterious or “wholly other”. The archetypal experience, then, is an experience, to one degree or another, of “otherness” within our own subjectivity. Jung described the power of the archetypes to fascinate, possess, and overcome us.
In the New Testament, for example, Paul spoke of “another law” at work within him. (Romans 7:15-23). Jung himself spoke of another “will” operating within him. He speaks of the experience of “spontaneous agencies”, and of “elements in ourselves which are strange to us”. And he describes the consciousness as being surrounded by “a multitude of little luminosities” or quasi-consciousnesses. (“On the Nature of the Psyche”, Collected Works, volume 8).
While the empiricist in him preferred the terms “unconscious” and “archetypes”, Jung explains that “God” and “daimon” are synonyms for the unconscious which convey the numinosity, the “otherness”, of the experience better:
“[Humankind] cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them [numinous experiences]; nor can he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God. [...] Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or God can be neither disproved nor affirmed. We can, however, establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche, is indeed authentic.
“We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious. The first three terms have the great merit of including and evoking the emotional quality of numinosity, whereas the latter the unconscious is banal and therefore closer to reality. [...] The unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to give much impetus to the imagination. [...]
“The great advantage of the concepts ‘daimon’ and ‘God lies in making possible a much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely, a personification of it. Their emotional quality confers life and effectuality upon them.”
(italics added).
The Experience of the Archetypes
Sometimes archetypal experiences arise out of contact with wild nature, in which case they may be identified with objects in nature, as when we name a place with the name of deity. (Perhaps this is how animism first arose.) Other times, archetypal experiences occur in the context of religious ritual, in which case they may be identified with the paraphernalia of the ritual. (This may be how totemism first arose.) In both these cases, the archetypal image may be equated with some object separate from us. But archetypal experiences do not always occur through interaction with an object. Sometimes, as in the case of dreams or active imagination, there is no external referent. (This may explain how spiritualism first arose.)
Regarding his own experimentation with active imagination (the subject of a future post), Jung wrote:
“Philemon [Jung's personal image of the "Wise Old Man" archetype] and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. [...] I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. [...] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections).
Philemon from Jung’s Red Book
Jung’s description of his own encounter with the archetypes here is fascinating from a polytheistic perspective. Jung acknowledges that his experience of an archetype was of a personality, something separate from what he identified as “I”. This experience of otherness within one’s own subjectivity can manifest in subtle ways such as inspiration, and in less subtle ways such as divine revelation, schizophrenia, or even so-called “spirit possession”. It should be evident that we are not speaking of mere metaphors here.
“Although everything is experienced in image form, i.e., symbolically, it is by no means a question of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the fate of a whole life may depend. The chief danger is that of succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and this is most likely to happen when the archetypal images are not made conscious. If there is already a predisposition to psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control altogether and become completely independent, thus producing the phenomena of possession.“ (“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works, vol. 9).
Jung could describe divine visitation and spirit possession as psychological, because for him the psyche was both more capacious and less unitary than what we ordinarily think of as the mind. It is indeed a “cosmos”. So is Jung saying it’s “all in our heads”? Yes. But, as Lon Milo Duquette writes, “you just have no idea how big your head is.” Jung explains:
“… the individual imagines that he has caught the [unconscious] psyche and holds her in the hollow of his hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. In reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island so that if it is a question of space, it does not matter whether the gods are ‘inside’ or ‘outside.’”
The Nature of the Archetypes
Jung’s view on the ontological nature of the archetypes is notoriously difficult to nail down. For one thing, his views evolved over his career, so it is possible to pull contradictory statements out of different works. For another, Jung’s writing is rarely a model of scientific clarity. But perhaps the most important reason is because he intentionally maintained a certain ambiguity on this issue. Charles D. Laughlin writes:
“I believe that the ambiguity was necessitated by Jung’s inability to scientifically reconcile his conviction that the archetypes are at once embodied structures and bear the imprint of the divine; that is, the archetypes are both structures within the human body, and represent the domain of spirit. Jung’s intention was clearly a unitary one, and yet his ontology seemed often to be dualistic, as well as persistently ambiguous, and was necessarily so because the science of his day could not envision a non-dualistic conception of spirit and matter.” (“Archetypes, Neurognosis, and the Quantum Sea”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 3 (1996)).
For Jung, the archetypes have both a material aspect (brain) and a non-material aspect (experience). New Age writers have a tendency to describe the archetypes as if they are Platonic forms, but Jung considered himself an empiricist and insisted on the biological nature of the archetypes:
“They [the archetypes] are inherited with the brain structure – indeed they are its psychic aspect. [...] They are thus [...] that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature, or in which its link with the earth and the world appears at its most tangible.” (“Mind and Earth”, Collected Works, vol. 10).
In spite of his commitment to empiricism, Jung rejected reductive forms of materialism. On the other hand, Jung also sought to avoid the opposite problem of psychologism, which reduced the gods to illusions. For Jung, the material and non-material aspects of the archetypes are two different aspects of the same thing, seen from two perspectives, one objective and one subjective. In philosophical terms, Jung was a “neutral monist” and adopted a “double aspect theory” to explain the relationship between the physical and the psychic.
In Jung’s view, the “gods” are term for the subjective experience of the archetypes. And Jung believed this was the only meaningful way to speak about gods. So, if I were to ask if the gods are “objectively real”, I would have to say “no” — at least not in the sense in which rocks, and dirt, and the sun are real. In Jung’s view, it makes no sense to speak of the gods apart from our own experience of them.
“… it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. If the historical process of world despiritualization continues as hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character out side us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated.” (“The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, vol. 11).
If human beings ceased to exist, then so would the gods. The gods have no ontological status apart from us. They have no transcendental referent. While they sometimes arise through our interaction with the world, this is not necessary. They may be a purely internal experience.
Polytheism and the Archetypes
Jungian theory explains why the experience one polytheist of a certain deity devotee could diverge from another’s. But it also explains why they are the sometimes the same, why Anthony’s experience (above) resembled that of another worshiper of the Morrigan. The answer is what Jung called the “collective unconscious”. The “collective unconscious” is a term which has been much abused and misunderstood, but I believe it can be explained from a naturalistic perspective.
In Affective Neuroscience (1998), neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp writes:
“… our brains resemble old museums that contain many of the archetypal markings of our evolutionary past. … Our brains are full of ancestral memories and processes that guide our actions and dreams but rarely emerge unadulterated by cortico-cultural influences during our everyday activities.”
This statement could easily have been written by Jung, instead of a neuroscientist. Because we share a biology and because groups of us share certain cultural conditioning, we can expect that certain of archetypal experiences will be similar in two people who have not interacted before. This is why we find similar motifs in the mythology of cultures separated by time and space, and this is why Anthony’s experience (above) resembles that of other devotees of the Morrigan.
Jung’s theory of the gods is, I believe, consistent with polytheist’s own descriptions of their experiences. Polytheists often describe the gods as needing human worship to give them existence, something like an egregore. I first encountered this idea expressed in the a 1967 episode of Star Trek titled “Who Mourns for Adonis?”, and later in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 book American Gods. (I have a theory that Gaiman’s book may have had a direct influence on the growth of hard polytheism in the Pagan community.) Perhaps the idea of egregores can be seen as polytheists’ way of acknowledging the subjectivity of gods. While some polytheists insist on the objectivity of their deities, I have seen more say that the question is irrelevant to them.
Still, to speak about the gods as subjective may seem reductive to some polytheists. When the world is examined through the objective lens of science, I maintain that the gods are absent. But, of course, this is also true of many other human experiences, like love, awe, and self-transcendence — experiences which many people describe as the most “real” experiences of their lives. A neuroscientist may reduce any of these experiences to biochemical reactions or light spots on an MRI, but such an explanation does not fully account for the experience. Something is missing from the purely objective description which the poet tries to express through words, an artist through paint or other media, the musician through an instrument, the dancer through movement, and the contemporary Pagan through ritual and myth.
I have written elsewhere about the need to emphasize the “otherness” of the archetypes. Jung warned against identification with the archetypes, which he called “inflation”. By emphasizing the otherness of the gods, we avoid reducing them to mere metaphors and we preserve the sense of danger that arises from interacting with the gods. On the other hand, it is possible to overemphasize the otherness of the gods, and this is what I believe polytheists do when they insist that their gods exist as distinct beings. What Christian theologian R. H. J. Steuart wrote about the Christian God could just as well have been written about polytheistic deities:
“We are obliged to preserve the concept of the ‘otherness’ of God [or the gods] from ourselves even though we cannot use it without distorting or at least wrongly stressing it. [...] It is an otherness which not only does not exclude but positively (just because it is what it is) includes and demands oneness — a oneness, indeed, which is actually more real and intimate than what we would normally describe as identification.”
October 4, 2012 By John Halstead
Do we worship the same gods?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/allergicpagan/2012/10/04/are-the-gods-real/
But what happens when two people who worship the same god or goddess meet up and realize that they have very different conceptions of the deity? Are they worshiping the same god? Or two gods with the same name?
Our god of many faces
“On the one hand, I believe, with every fiber of my being, in the knowledge I have been made privy of by the Gods. I believe in my experiences and they are sacred to me. They run anywhere from synchronicious events to detailed biographies and some of them I will never share with anyone, they were that special. Throughout my practice, I have allowed UGP to push me forward in my path. [...]
“On the other hand, there is UPG out there that contradicts mine, that I personally think is completely incorrect or that questions everything I believe in. Needless to say, this is UPG I struggle with. I can’t view it as invalid; I respect everyone’s path too much for that, but where does it fit in with my believes? We are talking about the same Gods, right?”
(emphasis added).
Which Hecate am I talking to today?
From a polytheistic perspective, there are ways to explain this. If the gods are persons, then it is possible for the gods to interact with different people in different way, to present different “faces”, as it were — just as we ourselves present different “faces” to different people. In fact, we sometimes speak as if we are different people in different situations or with different company. Perhaps this is true of the gods as well.
But is there another explanation? Is it possible to provide an account for polytheistic experience that is consistent with a naturalistic premise? Is there a naturalistic explanation for polytheistic experience that does not pathologize the experience and is consistent with polytheists’ own descriptions of their experiences?
Gods as Archetypes
Both Jung and “archetypes” have fallen out of favor in contemporary Pagan discourse, but I believe that is because Jung’s ideas have been watered down so that the term “archetype” has (incorrectly) become synonymous with “metaphor”. In this Jung-lite approach, the archetypal gods understood as mere metaphors for nature. But this is not what Jung had in mind when he spoke of archetypes.
The archetypes, according to Jung (in his mature thought), are “dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life.” (“Psychological Commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Collected Works, vol. 11). Jung saw the “gods” as anthropomorphic projections of the archetypes. The archetypes for Jung are ineffable and practically inexhaustible, characteristics that correlate with divine categories. Jung writes, “Psychologically speaking, the domain of ‘gods’ begins where consciousness leaves off [...]“ (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity”, Collected Works, vol. 11). He explains that the ruling powers of the psyche compels “the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from [humankind].”
“[...] we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity.” (“The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, vol. 11).
The archetypes are not metaphors. They are form without content, potentialities rather than actualities. Their existence can only be inferred from our experience of archetypal images, which are necessarily only partial expressions of the archetype.
Archetypes as “Other”
For Jung, the most powerful religious experiences are archetypal experiences. This was not a reductive claim, as Jung believed that the religious quest was the most meaningful aspect of human experience. Archetypal experience is “numinous”, a term Jung borrowed from Rudolf Otto. According to Otto, the essential characteristic of the “numinous” is that it is mysterious or “wholly other”. The archetypal experience, then, is an experience, to one degree or another, of “otherness” within our own subjectivity. Jung described the power of the archetypes to fascinate, possess, and overcome us.
In the New Testament, for example, Paul spoke of “another law” at work within him. (Romans 7:15-23). Jung himself spoke of another “will” operating within him. He speaks of the experience of “spontaneous agencies”, and of “elements in ourselves which are strange to us”. And he describes the consciousness as being surrounded by “a multitude of little luminosities” or quasi-consciousnesses. (“On the Nature of the Psyche”, Collected Works, volume 8).
While the empiricist in him preferred the terms “unconscious” and “archetypes”, Jung explains that “God” and “daimon” are synonyms for the unconscious which convey the numinosity, the “otherness”, of the experience better:
“[Humankind] cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them [numinous experiences]; nor can he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his conscious personality, he calls them mana, daimon, or God. [...] Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or God can be neither disproved nor affirmed. We can, however, establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche, is indeed authentic.
“We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious. The first three terms have the great merit of including and evoking the emotional quality of numinosity, whereas the latter the unconscious is banal and therefore closer to reality. [...] The unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to give much impetus to the imagination. [...]
“The great advantage of the concepts ‘daimon’ and ‘God lies in making possible a much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely, a personification of it. Their emotional quality confers life and effectuality upon them.”
(italics added).
The Experience of the Archetypes
Sometimes archetypal experiences arise out of contact with wild nature, in which case they may be identified with objects in nature, as when we name a place with the name of deity. (Perhaps this is how animism first arose.) Other times, archetypal experiences occur in the context of religious ritual, in which case they may be identified with the paraphernalia of the ritual. (This may be how totemism first arose.) In both these cases, the archetypal image may be equated with some object separate from us. But archetypal experiences do not always occur through interaction with an object. Sometimes, as in the case of dreams or active imagination, there is no external referent. (This may explain how spiritualism first arose.)
Regarding his own experimentation with active imagination (the subject of a future post), Jung wrote:
“Philemon [Jung's personal image of the "Wise Old Man" archetype] and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force that was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. [...] I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. [...] Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections).
Philemon from Jung’s Red Book
Jung’s description of his own encounter with the archetypes here is fascinating from a polytheistic perspective. Jung acknowledges that his experience of an archetype was of a personality, something separate from what he identified as “I”. This experience of otherness within one’s own subjectivity can manifest in subtle ways such as inspiration, and in less subtle ways such as divine revelation, schizophrenia, or even so-called “spirit possession”. It should be evident that we are not speaking of mere metaphors here.
“Although everything is experienced in image form, i.e., symbolically, it is by no means a question of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the fate of a whole life may depend. The chief danger is that of succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and this is most likely to happen when the archetypal images are not made conscious. If there is already a predisposition to psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control altogether and become completely independent, thus producing the phenomena of possession.“ (“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, Collected Works, vol. 9).
Jung could describe divine visitation and spirit possession as psychological, because for him the psyche was both more capacious and less unitary than what we ordinarily think of as the mind. It is indeed a “cosmos”. So is Jung saying it’s “all in our heads”? Yes. But, as Lon Milo Duquette writes, “you just have no idea how big your head is.” Jung explains:
“… the individual imagines that he has caught the [unconscious] psyche and holds her in the hollow of his hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. In reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island so that if it is a question of space, it does not matter whether the gods are ‘inside’ or ‘outside.’”
The Nature of the Archetypes
Jung’s view on the ontological nature of the archetypes is notoriously difficult to nail down. For one thing, his views evolved over his career, so it is possible to pull contradictory statements out of different works. For another, Jung’s writing is rarely a model of scientific clarity. But perhaps the most important reason is because he intentionally maintained a certain ambiguity on this issue. Charles D. Laughlin writes:
“I believe that the ambiguity was necessitated by Jung’s inability to scientifically reconcile his conviction that the archetypes are at once embodied structures and bear the imprint of the divine; that is, the archetypes are both structures within the human body, and represent the domain of spirit. Jung’s intention was clearly a unitary one, and yet his ontology seemed often to be dualistic, as well as persistently ambiguous, and was necessarily so because the science of his day could not envision a non-dualistic conception of spirit and matter.” (“Archetypes, Neurognosis, and the Quantum Sea”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 10, no. 3 (1996)).
For Jung, the archetypes have both a material aspect (brain) and a non-material aspect (experience). New Age writers have a tendency to describe the archetypes as if they are Platonic forms, but Jung considered himself an empiricist and insisted on the biological nature of the archetypes:
“They [the archetypes] are inherited with the brain structure – indeed they are its psychic aspect. [...] They are thus [...] that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature, or in which its link with the earth and the world appears at its most tangible.” (“Mind and Earth”, Collected Works, vol. 10).
In spite of his commitment to empiricism, Jung rejected reductive forms of materialism. On the other hand, Jung also sought to avoid the opposite problem of psychologism, which reduced the gods to illusions. For Jung, the material and non-material aspects of the archetypes are two different aspects of the same thing, seen from two perspectives, one objective and one subjective. In philosophical terms, Jung was a “neutral monist” and adopted a “double aspect theory” to explain the relationship between the physical and the psychic.
In Jung’s view, the “gods” are term for the subjective experience of the archetypes. And Jung believed this was the only meaningful way to speak about gods. So, if I were to ask if the gods are “objectively real”, I would have to say “no” — at least not in the sense in which rocks, and dirt, and the sun are real. In Jung’s view, it makes no sense to speak of the gods apart from our own experience of them.
“… it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. If the historical process of world despiritualization continues as hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character out side us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated.” (“The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol”, Collected Works, vol. 11).
If human beings ceased to exist, then so would the gods. The gods have no ontological status apart from us. They have no transcendental referent. While they sometimes arise through our interaction with the world, this is not necessary. They may be a purely internal experience.
Polytheism and the Archetypes
Jungian theory explains why the experience one polytheist of a certain deity devotee could diverge from another’s. But it also explains why they are the sometimes the same, why Anthony’s experience (above) resembled that of another worshiper of the Morrigan. The answer is what Jung called the “collective unconscious”. The “collective unconscious” is a term which has been much abused and misunderstood, but I believe it can be explained from a naturalistic perspective.
In Affective Neuroscience (1998), neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp writes:
“… our brains resemble old museums that contain many of the archetypal markings of our evolutionary past. … Our brains are full of ancestral memories and processes that guide our actions and dreams but rarely emerge unadulterated by cortico-cultural influences during our everyday activities.”
This statement could easily have been written by Jung, instead of a neuroscientist. Because we share a biology and because groups of us share certain cultural conditioning, we can expect that certain of archetypal experiences will be similar in two people who have not interacted before. This is why we find similar motifs in the mythology of cultures separated by time and space, and this is why Anthony’s experience (above) resembles that of other devotees of the Morrigan.
Jung’s theory of the gods is, I believe, consistent with polytheist’s own descriptions of their experiences. Polytheists often describe the gods as needing human worship to give them existence, something like an egregore. I first encountered this idea expressed in the a 1967 episode of Star Trek titled “Who Mourns for Adonis?”, and later in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 book American Gods. (I have a theory that Gaiman’s book may have had a direct influence on the growth of hard polytheism in the Pagan community.) Perhaps the idea of egregores can be seen as polytheists’ way of acknowledging the subjectivity of gods. While some polytheists insist on the objectivity of their deities, I have seen more say that the question is irrelevant to them.
Still, to speak about the gods as subjective may seem reductive to some polytheists. When the world is examined through the objective lens of science, I maintain that the gods are absent. But, of course, this is also true of many other human experiences, like love, awe, and self-transcendence — experiences which many people describe as the most “real” experiences of their lives. A neuroscientist may reduce any of these experiences to biochemical reactions or light spots on an MRI, but such an explanation does not fully account for the experience. Something is missing from the purely objective description which the poet tries to express through words, an artist through paint or other media, the musician through an instrument, the dancer through movement, and the contemporary Pagan through ritual and myth.
I have written elsewhere about the need to emphasize the “otherness” of the archetypes. Jung warned against identification with the archetypes, which he called “inflation”. By emphasizing the otherness of the gods, we avoid reducing them to mere metaphors and we preserve the sense of danger that arises from interacting with the gods. On the other hand, it is possible to overemphasize the otherness of the gods, and this is what I believe polytheists do when they insist that their gods exist as distinct beings. What Christian theologian R. H. J. Steuart wrote about the Christian God could just as well have been written about polytheistic deities:
“We are obliged to preserve the concept of the ‘otherness’ of God [or the gods] from ourselves even though we cannot use it without distorting or at least wrongly stressing it. [...] It is an otherness which not only does not exclude but positively (just because it is what it is) includes and demands oneness — a oneness, indeed, which is actually more real and intimate than what we would normally describe as identification.”
Bruneel, The World
Initiation Archetype
excerp: Trancce, Art, & Creativity, John Gowan
The concept archetype belongs to C. G. Jung. Ira Progoff in his book Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning presents an introductory statement to Jung's psychological theories and an interpretation of their significance for the social sciences. Progoff says about archetype (1973, 1952:58):
When psychic contents come up from the lower layers (referring to the preconscious structure of the psyche), they may become part of the conscious attitude of individual personality, but the first question is what these contents are in themselves. In this regard Jung has developed the concept of "archetype," by which he means "forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin" (C. G. Jung: Psychology and Religion (Terry Lectures, 1937), Yale University Press, New Haven, 1938, p. 63)
Archetypes are identified as "fundamental patterns of symbol formation." They have been present since ancient days "because they grow out of the nature of the psyche in its most rudimentary form." These primordial images, once they have occurred in human history are then passed on to future generations as "part of a collective inheritance"; a collective unconscious. Jung sees these as "inherited pathways" not "inherited ideas" (Progoff 1973, 1952:59).
What are inherited are the same tendencies . . . it is the underlying patterns of symbol formation and not their specific details that are always the same.
The symbolic content in fairy tales, religions, sagas and primitive myths is similar. The importance is not found in the actual symbol but in what it represents of the earlier and deeper levels of the psyche. Jung refers to these as "motifs," and says (1964:88)
Archetypes gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity (psychic energy) - their relationship to the living individual. . . . Their names mean very little . . . the way they are related to you is all important.
The fluidic character of the numinous element enables it to take on whatever characteristics are impressed upon it by passive will. Imagine this element as a great ocean of water. Since the property of our vivency produces in spirit a tendency to form, the interface or surface of the ocean will develop waves. These waves are as apersonal as the medium in which they are formed, nearly as enduring, and almost as hard to conceptualize. They are, of course, Jung's "archetypes of the collective unconscious." Others call them "generating entities" for they behave like a mathematical function which generates other functions (see Appendix). Blofeld (1970) calls them "gods of the mandala," and if one is religious they can be regarded as tutelary deities, but that is not necessary. We will use Jung's word "archetype"; as such they represent the first effort toward distinguishing form in an otherwise formless substance.
Being "presentational" (in Van Rhijn's sense - that is, cognized at less than the full symbolic level), such archetypes are most commonly seen during waking hours in art, which is also a creative legacy from the collective preconscious. Art is especially rich in dealing with the myth and folklore in a culture, and hence, with the archetype, is a symbol of the collective unconscious of a culture. Archetypes are also revealed in dreams, mandalas, tarot cards, ideographs, and glyphs, and indeed wherever the presentational form outweighs the idiographic.
Roberts (1970:x) states that her control "mentions the existence of symbolic figures which assume identifiable forms within the unconscious in order to communicate more effectively. . ."Jung noted the existence of what he called archetypal figures in the unconscious who often communicate to the conscious mind through the symbolic garb of mythical, religious, or great historical figures."
Jacobi quotes Jung (Jacobi 1959:31) writing in "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (Works, 9:1:267):
"Archetypes are factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, but in such a way that they can be recognized only by the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general."
Jacobi continues (1959:32) that from the study of archetypes we
. . . gain insight into the psyche of the archaic man who still lives within us, and whose ego as in mythical times is present only in germ, without fixed boundaries and still interwoven wholly with the world and nature.
And again (1959:37) Jacobi quotes Jung (Works,10:118):
Archetypes may be considered the fundamental elements of the conscious mind, hidden in the depths of the psyche . . . they are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time, images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure - indeed they are its psychic aspect.
Singer (1972:81) says:
It was Jung's understanding that the archetypes, as structural forming elements in the unconscious, give rise both to the fantasy lives in individual children and to the mythologies of a people (i.o.).
These archetypes represented certain regularities, consistently recurring types of situation and types of figures. Jung categorized them in such terms as "the hero's quest," "the battle for deliverance from mother," "the night-sea journey" and called them archetypal situations. He suggested designations for archetypal figures also, for example, the divine child, the trickster, the double, the old wise man, the primordial mother.
The numinous aspects of archetypes are well explicated in the following Jungian passages. Jung (1964:68) says:
One can perceive the specific energy of archetypes when we experience the peculiar fascination that accompanies them. They seem to hold a special spell. Such a peculiar quality is also characteristic of the personal complexes and just as personal complexes have their individual history so do social complexes of an archetypical character. But while personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetype create myths, religions and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history,
Again speaking of the archetypes, Jung (1964:87) points out that
(page 181)
they are both emotions and images; it is through emotion that psychic energy or numinosity comes to the image. Franz (ibid;377) points out that the dynamic aspect of archetypes have great emotional impact on the individual. Since their arrangement relates to the integration or wholeness of the individual they can affect healing and even creativity.
Neumann (1954:xv) calls archetypes "pictorial forms of the instincts." Calling the archetypes "psychic organs" Neumann (1954:xvi) says that
. . . they are the main constituent of mythology, that they stand in an organic relation to one another, and that their stadial* succession determines the growth of consciousness.
Neumann sees the mythological state arising out of the archetypes as the primal state of consciousness. In this primordial state man is literally one with nature. But (1954:xxiii) "contents which are primarily transpersonal, are in the course of development taken to be personal." Thus does the ego emerge out of the uruboros in both evolutionary development of the species and (by recapitulation) in the individual development of each human. (The uruboros is the primitive world - womb or circle depicted by a snake biting its own tail).
Neumann (1954:5) puts it:
The mythological stages in the evolution of consciousness begin with the stage when the ego is contained in the unconscious, and lead up to a situation in which the ego not only becomes aware of its own position and defends it heroically, but it also becomes capable of broadening and relativizing its experiences through the changes effected by its own activity.
He also adds in explanation (1954:197):
The myth, being a projection of the transpersonal collective unconscious depicts transpersonal events, and whether interpreted objectively or subjectively in no case is a personalistic interpretation adequate . . . Consequently the hero myth is never connected with the private history of an individual, but always with some prototype or transpersonal event of collective significance.
Neumann (1954:264) believes that much of the uruboros comes before the Great Mother, and she before the dragon fight. He believes that
----------------------------------------------
*stadial means "stage of development."
(page 182)
this shows their archetypal structure, and allows a method of comparing and dating different civilizations. The uruboro she points out (1954:266)
... is a borderline experience being individually and collectively prehistoric in the sense that history only begins with a subject ... when an ego and consciousness are already present.15
The uruboros hence:
. . . corresponds to the psychological stage in man's prehistory when the individual and the group, ego and unconscious, man and the world were so indissolubly bound up with one another that the law of participation mystique, of unconscious identity, prevailed between them.
He continues (1954:268):
Man's original fusion with the world ... has its best known anthropological expression in totemism which regards a certain animal as an ancestor, a friend, or some kind of powerful and providential being ... The same phenomenon of fusion as originally existed between man and the world also obtains between the individual and the group ...
Neumann (1954:270) points out:
The cardinal discovery of transpersonal psychology is that the collective psyche, the deepest layer of the unconscious, is the living ground current from which is derived everything to do with a particularized ego possession consciousness.
Franz (Jung 1964:378) believes that the archetypes appear not only in clinical analysis, but in the gamut of cultural activities, mythological, religious, and artistic, by which man expresses himself. And they have purpose. She says:
One can often decipher in them as in dreams the message of some seemingly purposive, evolutionary tendency of the unconscious.
The concept archetype belongs to C. G. Jung. Ira Progoff in his book Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning presents an introductory statement to Jung's psychological theories and an interpretation of their significance for the social sciences. Progoff says about archetype (1973, 1952:58):
When psychic contents come up from the lower layers (referring to the preconscious structure of the psyche), they may become part of the conscious attitude of individual personality, but the first question is what these contents are in themselves. In this regard Jung has developed the concept of "archetype," by which he means "forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin" (C. G. Jung: Psychology and Religion (Terry Lectures, 1937), Yale University Press, New Haven, 1938, p. 63)
Archetypes are identified as "fundamental patterns of symbol formation." They have been present since ancient days "because they grow out of the nature of the psyche in its most rudimentary form." These primordial images, once they have occurred in human history are then passed on to future generations as "part of a collective inheritance"; a collective unconscious. Jung sees these as "inherited pathways" not "inherited ideas" (Progoff 1973, 1952:59).
What are inherited are the same tendencies . . . it is the underlying patterns of symbol formation and not their specific details that are always the same.
The symbolic content in fairy tales, religions, sagas and primitive myths is similar. The importance is not found in the actual symbol but in what it represents of the earlier and deeper levels of the psyche. Jung refers to these as "motifs," and says (1964:88)
Archetypes gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity (psychic energy) - their relationship to the living individual. . . . Their names mean very little . . . the way they are related to you is all important.
The fluidic character of the numinous element enables it to take on whatever characteristics are impressed upon it by passive will. Imagine this element as a great ocean of water. Since the property of our vivency produces in spirit a tendency to form, the interface or surface of the ocean will develop waves. These waves are as apersonal as the medium in which they are formed, nearly as enduring, and almost as hard to conceptualize. They are, of course, Jung's "archetypes of the collective unconscious." Others call them "generating entities" for they behave like a mathematical function which generates other functions (see Appendix). Blofeld (1970) calls them "gods of the mandala," and if one is religious they can be regarded as tutelary deities, but that is not necessary. We will use Jung's word "archetype"; as such they represent the first effort toward distinguishing form in an otherwise formless substance.
Being "presentational" (in Van Rhijn's sense - that is, cognized at less than the full symbolic level), such archetypes are most commonly seen during waking hours in art, which is also a creative legacy from the collective preconscious. Art is especially rich in dealing with the myth and folklore in a culture, and hence, with the archetype, is a symbol of the collective unconscious of a culture. Archetypes are also revealed in dreams, mandalas, tarot cards, ideographs, and glyphs, and indeed wherever the presentational form outweighs the idiographic.
Roberts (1970:x) states that her control "mentions the existence of symbolic figures which assume identifiable forms within the unconscious in order to communicate more effectively. . ."Jung noted the existence of what he called archetypal figures in the unconscious who often communicate to the conscious mind through the symbolic garb of mythical, religious, or great historical figures."
Jacobi quotes Jung (Jacobi 1959:31) writing in "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (Works, 9:1:267):
"Archetypes are factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, but in such a way that they can be recognized only by the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general."
Jacobi continues (1959:32) that from the study of archetypes we
. . . gain insight into the psyche of the archaic man who still lives within us, and whose ego as in mythical times is present only in germ, without fixed boundaries and still interwoven wholly with the world and nature.
And again (1959:37) Jacobi quotes Jung (Works,10:118):
Archetypes may be considered the fundamental elements of the conscious mind, hidden in the depths of the psyche . . . they are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time, images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure - indeed they are its psychic aspect.
Singer (1972:81) says:
It was Jung's understanding that the archetypes, as structural forming elements in the unconscious, give rise both to the fantasy lives in individual children and to the mythologies of a people (i.o.).
These archetypes represented certain regularities, consistently recurring types of situation and types of figures. Jung categorized them in such terms as "the hero's quest," "the battle for deliverance from mother," "the night-sea journey" and called them archetypal situations. He suggested designations for archetypal figures also, for example, the divine child, the trickster, the double, the old wise man, the primordial mother.
The numinous aspects of archetypes are well explicated in the following Jungian passages. Jung (1964:68) says:
One can perceive the specific energy of archetypes when we experience the peculiar fascination that accompanies them. They seem to hold a special spell. Such a peculiar quality is also characteristic of the personal complexes and just as personal complexes have their individual history so do social complexes of an archetypical character. But while personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetype create myths, religions and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history,
Again speaking of the archetypes, Jung (1964:87) points out that
(page 181)
they are both emotions and images; it is through emotion that psychic energy or numinosity comes to the image. Franz (ibid;377) points out that the dynamic aspect of archetypes have great emotional impact on the individual. Since their arrangement relates to the integration or wholeness of the individual they can affect healing and even creativity.
Neumann (1954:xv) calls archetypes "pictorial forms of the instincts." Calling the archetypes "psychic organs" Neumann (1954:xvi) says that
. . . they are the main constituent of mythology, that they stand in an organic relation to one another, and that their stadial* succession determines the growth of consciousness.
Neumann sees the mythological state arising out of the archetypes as the primal state of consciousness. In this primordial state man is literally one with nature. But (1954:xxiii) "contents which are primarily transpersonal, are in the course of development taken to be personal." Thus does the ego emerge out of the uruboros in both evolutionary development of the species and (by recapitulation) in the individual development of each human. (The uruboros is the primitive world - womb or circle depicted by a snake biting its own tail).
Neumann (1954:5) puts it:
The mythological stages in the evolution of consciousness begin with the stage when the ego is contained in the unconscious, and lead up to a situation in which the ego not only becomes aware of its own position and defends it heroically, but it also becomes capable of broadening and relativizing its experiences through the changes effected by its own activity.
He also adds in explanation (1954:197):
The myth, being a projection of the transpersonal collective unconscious depicts transpersonal events, and whether interpreted objectively or subjectively in no case is a personalistic interpretation adequate . . . Consequently the hero myth is never connected with the private history of an individual, but always with some prototype or transpersonal event of collective significance.
Neumann (1954:264) believes that much of the uruboros comes before the Great Mother, and she before the dragon fight. He believes that
----------------------------------------------
*stadial means "stage of development."
(page 182)
this shows their archetypal structure, and allows a method of comparing and dating different civilizations. The uruboro she points out (1954:266)
... is a borderline experience being individually and collectively prehistoric in the sense that history only begins with a subject ... when an ego and consciousness are already present.15
The uruboros hence:
. . . corresponds to the psychological stage in man's prehistory when the individual and the group, ego and unconscious, man and the world were so indissolubly bound up with one another that the law of participation mystique, of unconscious identity, prevailed between them.
He continues (1954:268):
Man's original fusion with the world ... has its best known anthropological expression in totemism which regards a certain animal as an ancestor, a friend, or some kind of powerful and providential being ... The same phenomenon of fusion as originally existed between man and the world also obtains between the individual and the group ...
Neumann (1954:270) points out:
The cardinal discovery of transpersonal psychology is that the collective psyche, the deepest layer of the unconscious, is the living ground current from which is derived everything to do with a particularized ego possession consciousness.
Franz (Jung 1964:378) believes that the archetypes appear not only in clinical analysis, but in the gamut of cultural activities, mythological, religious, and artistic, by which man expresses himself. And they have purpose. She says:
One can often decipher in them as in dreams the message of some seemingly purposive, evolutionary tendency of the unconscious.
Complexes
Complexes, as strange attractors of undefined psychic energy, actually are the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche, unless they have been twisted by fate. What comes from the collective unconscious may be intense, but it is never "pathological." All our sickness comes from disturbances in the personal unconscious. This is where pure complexes are colored by our individual conflicts.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed with therapy, by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through. When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn't swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Erich Neumann commented in THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: We can see in pathological cases, in fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession, and again in every creative process where "the work" absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents, how an unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself. When the conscious mind cannot cope with these contents, the result is fragmentation, disorganization, disintegration -- chaos.
The role of the complex is determined by its interaction with the conscious mind, what states it creates. Without understanding, it de-stablizes the personality. But in so doing, it opens the possibility of re-stabilizing at another level. It takes understanding, assimilation, and integration of the complex to appease its destructive energy. Otherwise the conscious mind falls victim to a regression and is engulfed by the deep psyche.
Back to square one of the hero quest -- dragon-slaying. The danger, anxiety, and stress produced during a confrontation with complexes of the transpersonal psyche can create a personal catastrophe. Catastrophic chaos usually leads to what is called a bifurcation or splitting of the energy in two different directions. The experience may be shattering. But sometimes regression serves the process of evolution and leads to creative transformation and renewal of the self. Therefore, the potential benefit makes the risks worthwhile. It may lead to artistic creativity and expression.
tents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon. The parallel with the primitive belief in souls and spirits is obvious. This is where those energies and images come from. Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious.
Spirits are those of the collective unconscious. In psychotherapy, only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as "nodal points" as "nuclear elements," which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not unfold into the objective world. Although psychic energy operates continuously, it is "quantum-like" in nature.
The quanta in our comparison are the complexes, innumerable little nodal points in an invisible network. According to Jung and Jacobi, In them, as distinguished from the "empty" spaces, the energy charge of the unconscious collective psyche is concentrated, acting in a manner of speaking, AS THE CENTER OF A MAGNETIC FIELD. If the charge of one (or more) of these "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" (acting as a "nuclear cell") ATTRACTS EVERYTHING TO ITSELF and so confronts the ego with an alien entity, a "splinter psyche" that has become autonomous--then we have a complex. [Emphasis added by editor].
If that entity expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it has originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it has emerged from the personal unconscious.
In summary complexes have:
1). two kinds of roots - infantile trauma or actual events and conflicts.
2). two kinds of nature - pathological or healthy.
3). two kinds of expression - bipolar, positive and negative.
Complexes, as strange attractors of undefined psychic energy, actually are the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche, unless they have been twisted by fate. What comes from the collective unconscious may be intense, but it is never "pathological."
All our sickness comes from disturbances in the personal unconscious. This is where pure complexes are colored by our individual conflicts. When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed with therapy, by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed with therapy, by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through. When the conflict seems unresolvable for consciousness, when its desires are continually thwarted, we often find that it is the contents of the collective psyche that are intractable. If a complex remains only a greater or lesser strange attractor in the deep psyche, if it doesn't swell up with too much personal baggage, then it usually stays positive. It functions as the energy-giving cell from which all psychic life flows. But if it is overcharged it can turn negative, in the form of neurosis or psychosis.
Erich Neumann commented in THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: We can see in pathological cases, in fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession, and again in every creative process where "the work" absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents, how an unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself. When the conscious mind cannot cope with these contents, the result is fragmentation, disorganization, disintegration -- chaos.
The role of the complex is determined by its interaction with the conscious mind, what states it creates. Without understanding, it de-stablizes the personality. But in so doing, it opens the possibility of re-stabilizing at another level. It takes understanding, assimilation, and integration of the complex to appease its destructive energy. Otherwise the conscious mind falls victim to a regression and is engulfed by the deep psyche.
Back to square one of the hero quest -- dragon-slaying. The danger, anxiety, and stress produced during a confrontation with complexes of the transpersonal psyche can create a personal catastrophe. Catastrophic chaos usually leads to what is called a bifurcation or splitting of the energy in two different directions. The experience may be shattering. But sometimes regression serves the process of evolution and leads to creative transformation and renewal of the self. Therefore, the potential benefit makes the risks worthwhile. It may lead to artistic creativity and expression.
tents of the collective unconscious seem alien (Not-I), as if they had invaded from outside. The reintegration of a personal complex has the effect of release and often of healing (mental and physical). But the invasion of a complex from the deep collective psyche is a disturbing, even threatening, phenomenon. The parallel with the primitive belief in souls and spirits is obvious. This is where those energies and images come from. Souls correspond to the autonomous complexes of the personal unconscious.
Spirits are those of the collective unconscious. In psychotherapy, only a certain number of complexes, varying with the individual, can be made conscious. No one can ever fathom the entire contents of the psyche or self. To attempt to do so would be superheroic, an ego error. It is grandiose to consider. The remaining complexes continue to exist as "nodal points" as "nuclear elements," which belong to the eternal matrix of every human psyche. They remain potential and do not unfold into the objective world. Although psychic energy operates continuously, it is "quantum-like" in nature.
The quanta in our comparison are the complexes, innumerable little nodal points in an invisible network. According to Jung and Jacobi, In them, as distinguished from the "empty" spaces, the energy charge of the unconscious collective psyche is concentrated, acting in a manner of speaking, AS THE CENTER OF A MAGNETIC FIELD. If the charge of one (or more) of these "nodal points" becomes so powerful that it "magnetically" (acting as a "nuclear cell") ATTRACTS EVERYTHING TO ITSELF and so confronts the ego with an alien entity, a "splinter psyche" that has become autonomous--then we have a complex. [Emphasis added by editor].
If that entity expresses through mythical or universal transpersonal imagery, it has originated in the collective unconscious. If it is contaminated with individual, personalistic material, if it appears as a personalized conflict, then it has emerged from the personal unconscious.
In summary complexes have:
1). two kinds of roots - infantile trauma or actual events and conflicts.
2). two kinds of nature - pathological or healthy.
3). two kinds of expression - bipolar, positive and negative.
Complexes, as strange attractors of undefined psychic energy, actually are the generic forms and dynamic structure of the psyche. The complexes themselves are essential, healthy components of the psyche, unless they have been twisted by fate. What comes from the collective unconscious may be intense, but it is never "pathological."
All our sickness comes from disturbances in the personal unconscious. This is where pure complexes are colored by our individual conflicts. When the complex is cleared of the emotional baggage of the personalistic expression, its true, pure, archetypal center shines through. The personal was superimposed over the transpersonal, but that can be changed with therapy, by raising it into conscious awareness. Then the nucleus or archetypal core shows through.
Hieronymus Reusener 1588
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
